This is the web site of Steve Cohen, programmer,
motorcyclist, kayaker and all around geek
Professional Objective
To work for a company that aims to serve
its users, to produce a high quality product and to have
fun while doing it.
Computer
Skills
Languages: Java, XML, HTML, CSS, C, SQL, Scheme,
Regular Expressions, Pascal, JavaScript, JSP, SPARC
assembler.
Java: All Java core classes, Java RMI, Java Swing,
Java Networking, Java Crypto, ImageIO, JAI, Java 2D
Graphics, Java Reflection API.
APIs: Struts, O/R Mapping tools (Hibernate and OJB),
JDBC, GTK, Glade.
Platforms: Linux (8 years), Windows 95, Windows 98,
Windows NT4.0, Solaris (5 years), Windows XP,
HP/UX.
Servers: Apache, Tomcat (3 years), Samba (7 years),
qmail (3 years), Oracle (7 years), MySql (4
years).
Protocols: SOAP, TCP/IP, HTTP, UDP.
Architecture: UML, Design Patterns, Agile Development
(Xtreme Programming), MVC, Distributed
Computing.
Tools: Eclipse, Emacs, vi, Ant, CVS, GNU
Make.
Education
- High
School, June 1994. Honors Diploma
Orange High School
(Pepper Pike, OH)
- BS in
Computer Science, June 1999
The Ohio State
University (Columbus,
OH)
Employment
History
Senior Software
Engineer
Digital Chocolate (San Mateo, CA)
November 2004-Present
Digital Chocolate develops
entertainment, problem-solving, and social networking
software for mobile phones, and publishes games under
the Sumea brand.
Achievements:
- Third employee hired for
server team.
- Introduced SiteMesh. This
allows external developers to write small web
applications and not worry about formatting.
Senior Systems
Consultant
Avantia, Inc (Independence, OH)
July 2003-September 2004
Avantia is a small consulting company
that specializes in building custom solutions for a
niche vertical market.
Projects:
- RealFast Summit: Form
management and distribution system that allows a
company to automate Real Estate forms. Document
servers utilized JXTA peer to peer network to
distribute content. Content was delivered over secure
tunnels to ensure privacy. On-line application
features HTML to PDF conversion, printing and a
pluggable document repository. Utilized a variety of
open source tools to control costs. Contributed
source code to two projects. Utilized Mozilla's
rendering engine to convert HTML to PDF
reliably.
- Westfield Commercial Lines (Rating
Team): Westfield is a large insurance company
based in Northeast Ohio. The rating team's
responsibility was gathering and converting data for
a quote and sending it to the mainframe. Heavily
utilized BeanUtils to populate data objects.
Contributed deterministic method detection patch to
Jakarta Commons. Used jUnit to produce unit tests for
conversion components. Offered permanent
position
- RETS
Sandbox: The Real Estate Transaction Standard
(RETS) is a constantly evolving specification.
Because of this, the RETS community needed a common
discussion and collaboration forum. The RETS Sandbox
combined a source code repository, a continuous
integration build tool, discussion groups and a
mailing list to meet that need. Utilized agile
methods under the XP framework including test first
development and pair programming. Used Maven to
create continuous build process for multiple projects
under the RETS umbrella.
Senior
Developer
OfficeMax.com (Shaker Heights, OH)
June 1998-June 2003
OfficeMax runs one of the largest
volume retail web sites on the Internet. The site
offers office supplies and pay for print services to
customers in the United States and Canada. As one of
the seven original developers, I watched the site grow
from about 20 to over 5000 orders per day.
Achievements:
- Created copymax.com document
submission where users can upload documents to a
store for printing. Extended copymax.com architecture
to cater to businesses and power users. Over 100,000
customers used document submission from inception
until July,2003. Utilized SOAP to manage remote
document server. Projects delivered on time and
defect free.
- Developed stateless proxy
used to deliver third party content through the
officemax.com web site. Proxy used servlet
architecture to re-write HTML on the fly. Achieved
remarkable performance through extensive
profiling.
- Found and fixed bug in Java
1.3's network behavior. Patch incorporated into
JDK1.4.
- Built distributed database
connection pooling system to remedy architectural
problems with the application server. System featured
real-time monitoring and tuning capabilities
controlled by a GUI. Reduced database connections by
almost 90%, allowing the company to put off expensive
hardware upgrades.
- Seamlessly integrated third
party products into officemax.com web site allowing
additional products to be sold without increasing
inventory.
- Integrated calendaring and
email services to officemax.com web site. Used web
services and SOAP to transfer registration data.
- Created verifiable coupon
codes to combat online fraud.
- Transitioned catalog feeds
from using flat files to DTD-validated XML.
- Enhanced security by
utilizing public key cryptography to encrypt
sensitive data in the database.
- Worked with a team to create
Java objects that represent orders on the web site.
This allowed developers to manipulate orders more
easily than before and centralized all order
processing logic.