Chris Dent

Cornwall, United Kingdom
https://anticdent.org
cdent@anticdent.org

I am an experienced software developer, team leader and thinker with a passion for maximizing access to the information that empowers individuals and groups to get things done. I'm a vocal advocate of open protocols, open source, and the open web. I create tools that allow people to create, share and synthesize information on the web so they can learn and collaborate.

More detail.

Expertise

Strong social and technical leadership by example.
Project, product, team and community management.
Synchronous and asynchronous distance collaboration and collaborative tools.
Agile and open source methodologies.
Requirements gathering and systems analysis.
Python, Go, JavaScript, Perl and other languages in many Unix-like environments.
Design, development, and standardization of REST-oriented HTTP APIs.
Automating build, testing, deployment and monitoring of distributed systems.
Information architecture, classification theory and categorization.
Open source governance and community building.

Profiles

Experience

Staff Engineer 2, VMware

July 2022 - Present

Technical lead for the design and development of the R1 services within the VMware Centralized RIC Platform (CRIC), an implementation of the O-RAN Non-Real Time RAN Intelligent Controller.

Voting member of Working Group 2 of the O-RAN Alliance, defining standards for the Non-RT RIC including the R1 and A1 interfaces.
Develop and mature services for service and data management, exposure, consumption, and observation in golang and Python for the CRIC.
Active member of company-wide project to improve API standards and tooling.

Staff Engineer, VMware

October 2019 - June 2021

Evolve and maintain the HTTP API to a machine learning-driven platform (Uhana) for monitoring and automatically maintaining radio access networks in near real-time.

Port existing API from Python+Django to golang to improve scalability.
Design and build framework to concurrently process and aggregate millions of Cassandra rows, per request.
Manage API service in Mesos and Kubernetes.
Ongoing feature development and performance improvement.

July 2017 - October 2019

Participate in the design, development and governance of OpenStack.

Elected to two year long terms on the OpenStack Technical Committee.
Co-chair of the API-WG and API-SIG.
Leader in the Nova scheduling subteam.
Project Team Lead of the Placement project.

Principal Software Engineer, Mirantis

December 2015 - June 2017

Participate in the design and development of Nova, the OpenStack compute service.

Led the API working group to create guidelines for improving the consistency, correctness and stability of the OpenStack APIs.
Created the Placement HTTP API service for tracking inventories and allocations of consumable resources (e.g., disk, virtual CPUs, memory) used in making scheduling decisions.
Leader in the Nova scheduling subteam, directing the integration of existing Nova scheduler tools with the new Placement service.
Consistently in the top ten (of greater than 300) contributors (commits and code reviews) to the Nova project.
Mentored other developers within Mirantis and the wider OpenStack community.

Senior Software Engineer, OpenStack Telemetry, Red Hat

May 2014 - November 2015

Core member of the OpenStack Telemetry project, Ceilometer. Ceilometer provides services for measuring and monitoring resources in an OpenStack cloud and is an integral part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

Improved Ceilometer presence in testing and continuous integration tools (devstack, grenade, tempest).
Contributed to the API Working Group to set guidelines for consistency in all the OpenStacks APIs.
Created gabbi (listed below), a tool for declarative testing of HTTP APIs, and used it to vastly improve test coverage and readability.
Initiated project-wide decomposition of monolithic service into independent but cooperating services leading to improved maintainability and flexible use.

Director and Principal Developer, Peermore

December 2007 - April 2014

Peermore Limited is a consulting, systems design and development company. Peermore specializes in using the software and social techniques of the internet to allow groups of people and computers to see more, connect more and understand more.

Major placements:

Osmosoft, the open source innovation group at BT, architecting and implementing TiddlyWeb and TiddlySpace (listed below), leading the design of web applications, consulting on business process improvements and mentoring a team of remote and on-site web and open source developers.
Avox, developing wiki-data: "an open, extensible, linkable repository of company information".
Dr. Thomas + Partner, enhancing their TiddlyWeb-based customer documentation and knowledge base system.

Senior Developer, Information Access, Socialtext

September 2004 - December 2007

Senior developer building Perl-based wiki software for small to medium enterprises. All members of the development team worked remotely while effectively using agile technologies such as pairing, stories and the planning game.

Achieved order of magnitude performance improvements through a combination of code re-architecture and detailed profiling.
Enhanced Atom and RSS syndication capabilities.
Implemented SOAP API for Sharepoint-specific interoperability.
Led the team that built an HTTP API allowing interoperation with everything else.
Developed low bandwidth version ("miki") for effective use on mobile and limited connections.
Created "Socialtext Unplugged" pairing TiddlyWiki with the HTTP API for offline use of the Socialtext wiki.
Rationalized release management enabling concurrent feature development and rapid deployment.

Developer, Indiana University

2003 - 2004

Part of a small team of developers maintaining and enhancing the Indiana University Knowledge Base (KB): A self-service computing support resource for the members of the university community and a content management system for IT documentation.

Utilized techniques developed at Blue Oxen to create an information management system used by the distributed development team to streamline development processes.
Wrote the SOAP backend and WSDL to enable enterprise systems to interact with the KB.

Co-founder, Blue Oxen Associates

2002 - 2004

Co-founder of a think tank dedicated to researching and implementing high performance collaboration.

Created the Blue Oxen Way of evaluating and encouraging collaboration.
Developed Purple Numbers and Purplewiki, adding granular addressability and transclusion to the wiki environment.
Facilitated online "collaboratories" exploring how to bring the ideas of Doug Engelbart into the mainstream.

Director - Systems, Kiva Networking

1997 - 2000

Manager of a team of five system administrators at a statewide internet service provider during a period of significant growth and capitalization.

Oversaw the evolution from a fully manual to fully automated system for creating and managing users, user accounts and user services.
Migrated from multiple services on single server model to single services on single servers.
Developed a secure, distributed task automation infrastructure for managing those services.
Created a mod-perl driven environment for the management and presentation of a local newspaper's web presence.

Messaging and Networking Specialist, Indiana University

1995 - 1997

Member of the team that managed the SMTP, DNS and NNTP services for the students, staff and faculty of the university.

Projects

A sampling. See GitHub for more.

Placement

OpenStack resource provider inventory allocation service

Primary developer of an HTTP service for managing, selecting, and claiming providers of classes of inventory representing available resources in a cloud.

Gabbi

2014 - Present

Declarative HTTP testing.

Creator of a tool for running tests of HTTP APIs where requests and responses are represented in a declarative YAML-based form.

TiddlyWeb

2008 - Present

The canonical HTTP API for tiddlers: small chunks of content on the web.

Project originator, lead and community manager for a WSGI-based Python application originally created as a reference server side for TiddlyWiki; TiddlyWeb has since evolved into a robust generic content and data store with a pluggable architecture allowing multiple representations and storage systems.

PurpleWiki

2003 - 2004

A derivation of the Perl-based UseMod wiki implementing Purple Number based granular addressability of content on wiki pages and transclusion of content between wiki pages and other systems.

Education

Master Information Science, Indiana University

2001 - 2002

Effectively interspersed a course in HCI and information representation and retrieval with a general overview of computer science. Of special note:

The Computer As Tool, a paper exploring task and tool orientation in human computer interaction.
A Java Software Engineering course which began with a review of design patterns and ended with a grueling refactoring of the KnownSpace kernel and the implementation of the Helium UI over the kernel.

Writing

Inverting the Social Web with Internet Banks of Content

2011

The fundamental concept in an Internet Bank of Content (IBOC) is that rather than giving a piece of sociable content to a web service, a participant in the social web would upload or locate that content in their Bank and provide a URI to the service, called a presentation service. The bank holds the content in trust for the individual.