Garrison M. Brinkmann

5609 Sandbrook Lane
Hilliard, Ohio 43026
(614) 529-8948
resume@garrisonbrinkmann.com
http://ace.cs.ohiou.edu/~gbrinkma/resume/

Project:

Horizon

Employer: Clarity Consulting, Inc.
Chicago, IL
Contact: Jeff Smith
Partner, Clarity Consulting
1 N Franklin Ave Ste 3400
Chicago, IL 60606
(312) 863-3100
Client: Brandes Investment Partners
San Diego, CA
Dates: 9/2001 - 4/2002
Description: Horizon was a re-write of a large trading application currently in use at Brandes by all of its trading personnel. The existing Win32 trade application was not written to handle additional features. Brandes asked for Clarity’s help to design and implement the application as a Web app in the .NET Framework. I, along with three Clarity co-workers, joined Brandes’ team of 20 developers and DBAs to build the large app’s framework and interface. I was responsible for designing class structures and database schemas as well as implementing and integrating the data, business, and presentation tiers for an application-wide filtering system as well as the presentation tier of a stock profiling component, all using SQL Server, C#, and ASP.NET. All components went through exhaustive design stages and required documentation for business users as well as technical users, including schema diagrams, UML diagrams, and terminology definitions. I was also responsible for mentoring the client developers on general object-oriented programming methodology and .NET-specific methodologies.

The Horizon application was nominated by Clarity for Microsoft’s Certified Professional Awards this year.

Project:

.NET Code Snippets

Employer: Clarity Consulting, Inc.
Contact: Jeff Smith
Partner, Clarity Consulting
1 N Franklin Ave Ste 3400
Chicago, IL 60606
(312) 863-3100
Client: Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, WA
Dates: 4/2001 - 9/2001
Description: Microsoft needed help in order to finish documentation for its new Visual Studio .NET product in time for release. I, along with three Clarity co-workers, wrote sample code (called snippets) for several .NET Framework classes. I was responsible for writing sample code for all the methods in 30 classes in namespaces such as Threading and Collections. An example of my work can be found at MSDN.

Project:

Drill Down

Employer: Clarity Consulting, Inc.
Chicago, IL
Contact: Jeff Smith
Partner, Clarity Consulting
1 N Franklin Ave Ste 3400
Chicago, IL 60606
(312) 863-3100
Client: Arthur Andersen
Chicago, IL
Dates: 10/2000 - 3/2001
Description: Arthur Andersen previously developed a Web application that allowed users to drill down into their worldwide financial data like that of a file system, but increasing amounts of data and number of users led to poor performance. I, along with three Clarity co-workers, analyzed the performance issues and delivered a recommendation based on a design I devised. My design called for ridding the Web app of unnecessary full-page renders and instead using an XML-based communications system via JavaScript to obtain pieces of information from the server. I was responsible for delivering the server-side component in VB. I was also responsible for delineating the components for co-workers and client developers to work on as well as helping to migrate the solution into the existing application. Finally, I helped a co-worker with the XML/XSLT client-side portion of the solution.

Because of the benefits it was going to bring to Web applications, Andersen asked that we expand my solution into a framework that Andersen used in future Web applications. Our resulting solution improved performance of the system by 10 to 20 times and, because it drastically reduced wire traffic, it made “Drill Down” accessible to remote users with slow connections.

Project:

Code Migration

Employer: Clarity Consulting, Inc.
Chicago, IL
Contact: Jeff Smith
Partner, Clarity Consulting
1 N Franklin Ave Ste 3400
Chicago, IL 60606
(312) 863-3100
Client: Arthur Andersen
Chicago, IL
Dates: 5/2000 - 10/2000
Description: A lot of source code was moving through the Arthur Andersen Infrastructure Department. The code, stored in Visual SourceSafe, was sometimes deployed with late changes that were not thoroughly tested. When deployments failed, it was unknown as to why and digging for answers was time-consuming and expensive. Andersen asked myself and three Clarity co-workers to create a system that could automatically migrate, or build and promote, code while giving Andersen flexible control over the build process and elaborate logging in order to easily discover solutions to problems. I was responsible for helping design the program flow and database schema. In addition, I added powerful options that enabled the system to perform smarter builds. I also wrote data and business tiers in Visual Basic, which interacted with a SQL Server. I wrote a service in C++ that each promotion target machine would run to look for recently migrated code. Finally, I wrote a test applet that allowed manual migrations. That applet evolved into a main administration application for the system.

Project:

Hanson Brothers Interoperability Sample

Employer: Clarity Consulting, Inc.
Contact: Jay Schmelzer
Partner, Clarity Consulting
1 N Franklin Ave Ste 3400
Chicago, IL 60606
(312) 863-3100
Client: Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, WA
Dates: 1/2000 - 5/2000
Description: Before .NET was introduced, Microsoft was setting the foundation for XML in all its development areas. They wanted interoperability between platforms to be a key component of the .NET initiative. They asked me and two Clarity co-workers to create the Hanson Brothers Interoperability Sample for MSDN. Microsoft and Clarity wanted to create the most practical example of adding platform interoperability to an existing Unix back-end system. The sample was to showcase XML communication between a Web site hosted on a Windows 2000 and a product database hosted on a Solaris box. My role was to lay out all the non-Windows components. I was responsible for writing the “legacy” GNU C++ business object that communicated with an Oracle 8i database using PL/SQL. I also wrote a Java business object that communicated with the C++ object via CORBA and converted those requests and responses to XML in the SOAP format, essentially creating a Web Service layer on top of the “existing” CORBA-C++-Oracle solution. Then, the Windows 2000 Web server would request data from my Java object via Microsoft’s SOAP Toolkit (then in alpha) and display the data in a Web site.

The sample solution was presented to a 2000-member audience at the Professional Developer’s Conference in Orlando in July 2000 when the .NET Framework was introduced.

Project:

Pay for Performance

Employer: Clarity Consulting, Inc.
Chicago, IL
Contact: Jeff Smith
Partner, Clarity Consulting
1 N Franklin Ave Ste 3400
Chicago, IL 60606
(312) 863-3100
Client: Ameritech
Hoffman Estates, IL
Dates: 8/1998 - 9/1999
Description: Ameritech has hundreds of workers all over its coverage area providing many services to its customers. In order to appropriately reward its employees for work well done, Ameritech pays a bonus based on their performance. To make the performance analysis as objective as possible, Ameritech asked Clarity to create a Pay-for-Performance (PFP) system. I, along with four Clarity co-workers, created and delivered a PFP system in SQL Server that imported data from 300 unique feeds company-wide and normalized the data into a warehouse. The system also delivered summary and individual reports on hundreds of employees. I was responsible for writing dozens of stored procedures and bulk-loading scripts to import and massage the data. I also wrote approximately 50 reports in VB and Access that aggregated the SQL Server data for consumption via a Web application that could be accessed by managers throughout Ameritech’s coverage area.

Project:

Lippincott Asset Tracking

Employer: Electronic Vision
Athens, OH
Contact: Vic Matta
Systems Administrator, Electronic Vision
5 Depot St
Athens, OH 45701
(740) 592-2433
Dates: 12/1999 - 9/2000
Description: Lippincott, a medical material publisher, wanted to expose their asset-tracking database (LAT) on their intranet intended for several users. I was solely responsible for designing the look and feel of the site to meet Lippincott’s tastes as well as designing and implementing the data and business tiers in Visual Basic that would deliver LAT data from SQL Server to the presentation tier, which was written in ASP. After converting their flat data to a relational model, I implemented browsing pages as well as an advanced search page that permitted easy entry of Boolean-type criteria. I also implemented a record-locking mechanism along with an administration page. I secured the site with role-based COM security.

Project:

Student Payroll

Employer: Ohio Univeristy Libraries
Chicago, IL
Contact: David Dudding
Technical Services Head, Ohio University Libraries
Alden Library
Athens, OH 45701
(614) 594-0981
Dates: 10/1995 - 4/1997
Description: OU Libraries traditionally calculated students’ payroll manually. As the number of student employees grew, the task became error-prone and time-consuming. I was solely responsible for designing an interface reflecting input from the library’s payroll administrator and designing an implementing an Access database system behind the interface. I was also responsible for creating Access reports that rolled up payroll data.