Vastera, Inc. is in the business of providing solutions for the import/export industry which assists companies in handling both the related government regulations and the logistics involved.
I was hired as a Senior Software Engineer to handle special projects which did not fit the established niche. Some of the systems I created were:
A domain name system interface. This system provided a TOOL interface for DNS resolution. This consisted of a set of classes written in TOOL (FORTE).
A socket interface. This system provided a TOOL interface for socket communications, encapsulating the lower lever interfaces. This consisted of a set of classes written in TOOL.
A Postscript interface. This system provided a TOOL interface to write Postscript (.ps) files with a common interface with several other systems. This consisted of a set of classes written in TOOL.
An email interface. This system provided a TOOL interface for sending email. This consisted of a set of classes written in TOOL.
An Adobe PDF interface. This system provided a TOOL interface to write PDF (.pdf) files with a common interface with several other systems. This consisted of a set of classes written in TOOL.
A higher level TOOL interface which provides a consistent interface for printing, emailing and faxing. Printing could be accomplished by the generation of Postscript or PDF files or could be accomplished by interfacing to the native TOOL printer classes. Faxing was accomplished by building a document and then either emailing or sending the document to a fax server.
A standalone socket server which provides a database search for restricted parties using name, address, country, state, phone number, fax number, email address and web address matching and date filtering. This is a very large C++ system consisting of approximately 200 classes and 90,000 lines of code. It is a multi-platform (NT, HP/UX, AIX and Solaris) application which can run in standalone mode for batch matching, can interface to a SAP application and provides two different socket interfaces, including one using XML. There is also an ISAPI interface for efficient web interfacing. Creation of this system involved a large amount of research into name matching algorithms. The effectiveness of this system is unrivaled by that of any competitor. The server is both integrated into the main application and is a complete standalone product. Data files can be read and written in four different formats, including a binary format, a CSV format, a text format and as an XML document.
I was part of a team which provided an interface to the FedEx shipment tracking application. This project required that I install Oracle locally and write SQL interface code.
A set of classes to provide portable XML parsing. The XML parser is non-validating (and does not parse DTDs since these are not intended to be present in the target applications). This parser is recursive descent, based directly on the XML grammar supplied by the W3C committee.
A set of classes to provide portable multithreading support across several platforms -- NT, OS/2, AIX, HPUX, Solaris and several others.
Several Perl programs used to analyze TOOL code and perform several other minor tasks.
Several small programs for clients.
Generally, I worked on complete projects as a telecommuter with complete autonomy. For some projects, I worked closely with a few other individuals, mostly via telephone and email. However, as necessary, I made trips to headquarters when special needs arose. My work on Unix platforms was carried out via FTP and TELNET.
When hired, I selected the parts and constructed the computer system I would use. I also used a company paid phone line and ISDN line for high speed connection to the company intranet. I handled all hardware and software maintenance on the local systems I used for development.
While at Vastera, I attended several conferences such as OOPSLA (including tutorials) and took a number of courses such as UML.
I was originally employed by Export Software International which was renamed to Vastera, Inc. to better reflect the increasing scope of support brought to the import/export industry.
Due to a reduction in the amount of work that could be handled remotely, management requested that I move to Washington, DC to be more available for other projects. The telecommuting arrangement has been very effective for the applicable projects and my performance reviews are always outstanding. However, while a nice place to visit, DC is not a place that I prefer to live and further, moving to DC presented some logistical problems which were not solvable in the desired time frame. These logistical problems no longer exist.
C++
Perl
TOOL (Forte')
SQL
XML
Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II microprocessors
AIX
HPUX
Solaris
Windows NT (versions 4.0)
Windows 2000 Professional
MsDos (versions 4, 5 and 6)
Unix (AIX, HPUX and Solaris)
Visual C++ (versions 4.2, 5.0 and 6.0)
VisualAge C++ for OS/2 (version 3.0 and 4.0)
VisualAge C++ for Windows (version 3.5 and 4.0)
HPUX C++
AIX C++
Solaris C++
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Word
RimStar
Derrick Cobey (703-661-9006)