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

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.

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.

July 2017 - October 2019

Participate in the design, development and governance of OpenStack.

Principal Software Engineer, Mirantis

December 2015 - June 2017

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

Co-founder, Blue Oxen Associates

2002 - 2004

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

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.

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:

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.

TiddlyWeb: HTTP for Tiddlers

2010

Describes the lessons learned while developing TiddlyWeb as a resource oriented HTTP API.

The Computer as Tool: From Interaction To Augmentation

2002

Describes a design approach wherein computers and computer applications are thought of as tools rather than interactive devices. This paper was instrumental in forming the Blue Oxen Way, a framework for a philsophy of collaboration.

Creating Conceptual Access: Faceted Knowledge Organization in the unrev-ii email archives

2002

The email archive of the unrev-ii list is the basis for this ongoing project, to build an access tool for an email archive that also functions as a knowledge repository.

Hypertext and Knowledge Enhancement

2001

A fun and rambling exploration of hypertext and knowledge enhancement driven by a hypertext tool specially created for the project.