I make my living as a software engineer at General Motors in Austin, Texas, since 2016. I'm ostensibly "building smarter globally connected vehicles and transportation systems" as the propaganda puts it. Our current focus is on the great coordination challenge of securing the software that keeps the lights on in the daily operation of the company and its vast supply chain as well as the actual software that makes the vehicles hum. Of late there's also a push towards the self driving nirvana with its attendant focus on Big Data and what have you. Cybersecurity is the term or art for what I do, although the day to day working life is more prosaic.

Oracle was my earlier port of call (I joined when my former company BEA was acquired in 2008) for 12 years. Previously I worked at IBM, again for 12 years, in its Emerging Web Technologies team at IBM Software Group from 2006 to 2008, and filling much the same role from 1995 to 2006 as part of Lotus Software

Throughout my career, my focus has been on leveraging REST, the web style, that thing called social software and my pet area of interest: networks.

I am currently working on a book about technology adoption and system design in the internet age: The Low End Theory. You can read some initial sources online in the Toli Technology Series.

Some products I've worked on:

• Oracle Social Data and Insight Cloud
  Call it a Data as a Service offering on Oracle's Public Cloud. I think of it as a proving ground for Oracle's cloud and analytics ambitions.

• Oracle Activity Graph
  A general purpose recommendation system much like what you'd find at Amazon or Netflix that uses collaborative filtering to provide contextual recommendations and moreover uses what we call Activity Rank (perhaps analogous to Google's Page Rank) to add intelligence to search.

• Dojo Toolkit
  I am a committer to this open source project — the most complete JavaScript framework for building rich web applications. I own and maintain the layout widgets and deal with the core infrastructure.

• Frelance Graphics
  A very cool presentation graphics program. In my opinion, far more usable than PowerPoint and much more elegant. I designed and implemented their web publishing features, worked on their Review and Comment as well as their remote screen show collaboration features.

• Lotus K-station
  aka - the knowledge management portal. The first rich web application at IBM. Build and customize your portal in 5 minutes. Drag and drop 'knowledge windows', create your own 'portlets', themes, places, instant messaging, people-awareness... Create personal, shared or public 'places' with private or community bookmarks. Servlets, JSPs, XML, DHTML, Javascript, XSL - we do it all... I wrote the client-side JavaScript framework and the backend infrastructure for the collaborative portlets. It was one of the first commercial offerings of those things now labelled 'Ajax', and a precursor to all those community sites with their "places and spaces".

• WebSphere Portal
  The successor to K-station. The collaborative services and community features were my main contribution as was a core Event Broker service. Later I developed the "Simple Browser Productivity Components": the JavaScript and DHTML Spreadsheet, Presentation and Rich Text Editor components. You can read all about their history on my blog.

• Lotus Workplace, now IBM Workplace.
  The tag line is something like People, Processes and Things and my contribution was on forms technology. I wrote multiple versions of forms processors - based on the XForms standard, and integrated them with a form designer and content management system.

• Lotus Web ScreenShow Player
   (codename Chaplin). A Plugin and ActiveX Component (yeah, yeah I know, Microsoft technologies) but neat nevertheless.

• The Longfellow Project in Lotus' eSuite offering; a client/server application service package with java applets used for viewing and filtering office documents. All the buzzwords are covered: Java, CORBA, distributed computing...

I also do a fair bit of hacking on web development. You can find me lurking on rest-discuss, fiddling with the Atom Publishing Protocol, writing odes to HTML buttons or debating the end-to-end principle.

I'm an Electrical engineer by training courtesy of Harvard University 1991-1995.