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Azad Bolour - Software Consultant

Principal at Bolour Computing

Independent software consultant since 1987. Architect, team lead, developer. Expertise in the Java and the JVM ecosystem. Recent experience in Scala, Haskell, React, Cloud Foundry.

azadbolour at bolour.com

web site

Professional Interests

Hands-on technical leadership in a tight-knit software development team. Contribution to all aspects of the development process, including product definition, system design and construction, and the development process itself. Preference for modern functional programming langauges like Scala. Preference for a low ceremony self-organizing team culture.

Experience

Independent Software Consultant - Bolour Computing - 1987 - Present

Please see individual items below for a sampling of my clients.

Scala Consultant - Rally Health

Under contract with Artima, Inc. Spearheaded the implementation of an authorization microservice for a family of Rally’s services, in Scala, using Play and MongoDB. The authorization service allows security personnel to manage the capabilities of different roles in the organization to access the functions and the data of different services.

Senior Software Consultant - GE Digital - Jun 2015 - Apr 2016

Designed and implemented a deployer for applications composed of an evolving set of micro-services. The application is described declaratively by identifying the specific build numbers of its micro-services. The deployer obtains the specified artifacts from an artifact repository (artifactory) and deploys them to the cloud (Cloud Foundry). The deployer focuses on consistency, traceability, and performance. Blue-green deployment is used for consistency. Bi-directional traceability is provided by tracking the evolution of a composite application in Git, and by tracking data about the deployed versions of micro-services in the cloud itself.

Senior Software Consultant - Attensity Inc. - Jan 2014 - Jan 2015

Designed and implemented a real-time streaming query processing system for social media data, using Groovy/Grails and Akka.

Consultant at VMware - Mar 2013 - Sept 2013

Developed a user activity tracking and logging system for the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) in Scala using the Akka actor system and the Slick data access API. Implemented population and migration processes for the vCHS database.

Software Consultant - SeatAdvisor, Inc. - 2010 - 2012

Designed and developed a new generation the SeatAdvisor’s REST API. Upgraded SeatAdvisor’s code base and build tools to facilitate automated testing, continuous integration, and other modern software practices.

Senior Architect - PS’Soft - 2007 - 2008

Led PS’Soft’s modernization team to design the next generation of IT asset management services, based on .NET and C#. Initiated an agile development process. Worked hands-on with the development team to define and build the domain model and REST API of the new asset management system. Led the evaluation, selection, and integration of third party frameworks and libraries.

Chief Architect - MyBuys - 2005 - 2006

Technical lead of MyBuys’ development team. Spearheaded the development of a web-based system for capturing consumer preferences, matching preferences to retailer inventories, and providing shopping alerts to consumers through email and RSS. Architected the system based on the Spring framework and Hibernate. Built significant parts of the preference capture and matching system.

Consultant - Borland - 1998 - 1999

Benchmarking of the Borland Enterprise Server: Borland’s J2EE platform. Implemented the TPC-W benchmark by using Java Servlets and EJBs. Deployed and tuned the benchmark on the Sun Solaris platform by using Oracle.

Consultant - Siemens Communications - May 1993 - Dec 1993

Designed, implemented, and deployed an update-anywhere data replication scheme, based on the Sybase Replication Server, for the Siemens Modification Request Tracking System, a global software life cycle information system, with database replicas in California and Germany.

Consultant - Pacific A&M Insuarance - 1990 - 1991

Led the development team of the Pacific A&M Information System, an insurance administration, marketing, and accounts receivable system. Designed, implemented, and deployed the system by using the INGRES RDBMS.

Sun Microsystems - Member, Technical Staff - 1985 - 1987

Co-designed the Network Software Environment, an integrated development platform for configuration management, version control, coordinated development, and release management.

Ingres Corporation - Member of Technical Staff - 1983 - 1985

Designed and implemented B-trees, a dynamic storage structure for tables and indexes in the relational database management system INGRES.

University of California, Berkeley - Lecturer - Computer Science Division - 1977 - 1983

Taught various undergraduate courses.

University of California, San Francisco - Assistant Professor, Medical Information Science - 1976 - 1982

Research. Studied the representation and processing of time in databases. Proposed a basis for the management of historical data. Teaching. Taught graduate and undergraduate computer science courses. Supervised Master’s and Ph.D. students.

Education

University of California, Berkeley - Ph.D., Computer Science - 1972 - 1976.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bachelor’s and Master’s, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - 1967 - 1972