Name Robert H. Thornburrow
Age 41
Nationality British
Current Address Cheshire, England, United Kingdom

Education

Degree: BSc (Hons) Computation (2.1) at UMIST, Manchester, England

S-Level: Maths (2)    A-Level: Maths (A); Physics (A); Chemistry (A)

A/S-Level: Computing (A)    GCSE: 8

Employment

Company Owner (Mar 2014 -)
Having decided to branch out on my own, I have published my first mobile phone app, revamped a number of websites, and started taking on consulting work in a number of areas.

Principal Consultant (Nov 2003 - Mar 2014)
A varied role providing onsite consulting and training in various Software Change Management and DevOps products, implementing solutions for customers throughout Europe, predominantly with CA Harvest, but also building integrations with other tools like Quality Center and CruiseControl. Customers included many well known banks, insurers and financial institutions. My employer also had a number of their own products in which I was instrumental with their design and development. I presented one of these products at CA World.

Senior Consultant (Sept 1996 - Oct 2003)
Worked up from a Software Engineer, through Technical Architect to Senior Consultant in the employ of a leading multi-national CORBA/Java/.NET/OO Consulting and Training company.  My job for the seven years I was there involved a diverse mixture of Consulting, Architecture, Mentoring, Training, and Software Development.  Almost all of this work has involved working directly with clients (mainly large banks, insurance and telecoms houses), including helping to direct their IT stragegies and architect their software systems.  I have had projects exhibited at such shows as CTExpo and JavaOne.  I presented seminars and training courses (some up to a week long) on behalf of my employer and have been involved in the writing and development of their training material.  I have also played a role in setting up parts of their network and looked after their website in their early days.  During the entire time I kept my hand in with some routine systems adminstration.

Software Engineer (Aug 1994 - Sept 1996)
Employed by a small software house to develop their own product, a C++ documentation tool (a pre-cursor to JavaDoc, but more powerful).  My role was in the design and development of the parser technology used to extract comments and semantic information from source code.  I was responsible for the development of fuzzy parsing techniques and comment association technology. I also provided Technical Support for the product.   My last year also saw me as the company's Systems Administrator, running their Sun SPARC network and mail system.

Professional Skills

Training and Seminar presentation (>650 hours).  I am used to communicating complex and technical ideas to a variety of levels of personnel.  Used to travelling and getting around whilst abroad.

I speak a little French and a very small amount of German, both of which I would like to improve.

Technical Skills

Java (>17 years inc. 4 years teaching), C++ (>20 years), C (>22 years), CA Harvest (10 years),
CORBA (>7 years inc. 3 years teaching), UML (>4 years), TCP/IP (>20 years), Linux (>15 years),
RDBMS (>10 years), XML (>5 years), C# & .NET (6 months)
In excess of 30 years programming experience (I started young), >20 years applying Object Oriented programming techniques. My Java, CORBA, C and C++ experience is both extensive and intensive, and my work has always necessitated knowledge of all the above subjects, not just in depth, but in breadth also.
Plus knowledge of: RDMBS - Persistence, Oracle, Sybase, SQL;  OS - Linux, Win32, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX;  Routers; GUI - X-Windows, COM/ActiveX, Swing, Eclipse;  Languages - GCC, Visual C/C++, C#, VB.NET, Qt, Lex/Flex, Yacc/Bison, HTML/XHTML, CSS, XML, XSL-T, JavaScript, JQuery, Pascal, OO-Pascal, Lisp, Sed, Awk, Unix Shell-scripting, MFC, Visual Basic, COBOL, OPL; Assembler - ARM, 68000, 6502, Java Byte-code;  Tools - Ant, Make, Maven, RCS, CVS, Perforce, Swarm, CruiseControl, ThoughtWorks Go
Java I have in-depth industrial and teaching experience of most aspects of Java, including: Language; AWT; Input/Output; Networking; Security; JFC/Swing; Beans; Servlets; JavaIDL; RMI; JTAPI; JavaBlend; JDBC.  I also have a good knowledge of the inner workings of the Java Virtual Machine having written my own lightweight implementation.
CORBA I build CORBA systems of varying shapes and sizes, taking into account important issues such as development-time, scalability, performance and maintainability.  This work has brought me into direct contact with VisiBroker, Orbix, Neo and COM/CORBA Bridges, including some work on building a dynamic COM/CORBA bridge and bridging between ORBs.  I have also built a load-balancer in C++ as part of a piece of systems integration work. I have taught a number of CORBA courses over the years.
C++ My grounding in C++ came through my first employer, where I worked solidly in C++ for two years on the development of a C++ documentation tool.  My role in the project was to build a C++ parser capable of handling most C++ dialects and extracting comments (this was a true parser, as the tool was required to "understand" the code it was documenting).  I am using C++ again today, mainly in the production of Unix/Linux software. I am now using C++ to develop a cross-platform multi-threaded Gui.
Other

As you will see by the rest of my website, I am a keen GNU/Linux user and advocate the use of FOSS (Free Open Source Software, as in Free Software released under the GNU General Public License) and indeed a lot of my own software has been made available under the terms of the GPL.  I have been using Linux for over 5 years, and am used to installing and setting up Linux servers, and performing upgrades and maintenance on them. I also help support a Linux modem driver.

I have several years experience of being a part-time Unix Sys Admin on both SunOS and Solaris, with a small amount of Windows NT thrown in.  I have a good understanding of the day-to-day issues of running a network and have a good knowledge of setting up TCP/IP networks connected to the Internet.
Interests Due to all my travelling, I have little time for hobbies. When I can, I like to go out with a camera and take photographs. I enjoy landscape photography and have just started experimenting with macro photography. I usually take my camera with me on my travels, so I can look back and see where I've been.
Position Sought I am looking for a challenging, exciting, responsible and appropriately-paid position at the cutting edge of technology.  I would like to maintain a Technical career path as much as possible (it's what I find most challenging and rewarding), but need to combine that with management responsibility and decision making.  I am open to offers as a contactor, but have a preference for permanent employment.
Contact Due to not being office-based, phone numbers (even mobiles) are rather useless, so if you have any interesting propositions, please email .  I can usually read email from wherever I am.