Eric Armstrong

Software Systems and Documentation
Strategist, Evangelist, Technologist

Summary

Self-starter with no end of project ideas. A passionate user-advocate and risk-taker, with the imagination necessary to elucidate a "grand vision" coupled with the practical experience needed to keep projects grounded in reality. Ability to communicate, inspire, and motivate, "sharing the vision" to generate excitement. A skilled writer, software developer, and production specialist who likes to be hands-on, with a variety of publications and development projects to his credit.

Goal

Work with a team of smart people, integrating and building tools that enable collaboration and enhance productivity.

Professional Experience

Independent (2009-)

Focus on making contributions to the open source and entrepreneurial communities.

• Development: RuDI. Ruby Utilities for DITA processing. Applying Ruby's capacity for DSL-construction, in conjunction with DreamWeaver templates, to streamline the DITA production process, improve authoring efficiency, and (eventually) empower distributed design-and-decision-making processes online. 
  (JRuby, RSpec, RDoc, NetBeans, DITA OT)
   
• Technology Assessment: Summarized the technology vision. Proposed an initial "proof of principle".
  

Eric is like a great translation machine!  Put in technologeze and out comes English.
--Sandy Klausner, Founder, CubeSystems

Sun Microsystems (2005-2009)

Acted as a technical resource for a team of 12 writers. Documented procedures, established infrastructure, and managed production processes for 13,500 documents, combined from half-a-dozen workspaces, and delivered to multiple outlets
(including the localization group).

• Initiated the group's move to the DITA document format. Investigated the technology, evaluated and selected tools, ran the pilot study, gave talks on rationale and lessons learned, and participated in team-building.

  Eric communicates effectively with groups and individuals. If he has new information or discoveries of note, he shares them with everyone and listens (an important quality) to what people say in response.

• Defined semantics for generated web pages. Built tools to automate the process. (Javascript, JSP, Glassfish, Ruby)
  

  Kudos to Eric for making the (web page) vision a reality. He thought it through, raised and clarified various semantic issues, and is the technical brain behind the implementation.

• Evaluated several CMS systems. Designed algorithms for automated link management in a vanilla version control system (VCS) like Subversion.
   
• Devised a DITA implementation strategy and rollout plan.

  I have found Eric to be super creative and innovative...but he also has a pragmatic approach that produces results in the real world.

• Ran a DITA pilot. Took notes on lessons learned. Wrote papers and gave presentations to explain DITA's major concepts. Listed, clarified, and identified heuristics for the 20-some design decisions that face any DITA project. (blog post pending) Wrote a paper on one of them, published at CIDM. (See publications.)
  
  

  Eric's progress with the DITA pilot is directly attributable to his tenaciousness and his technical acumen.

• Investigated collaboration vehicles for online editing. (Wikis, DITA editors, publishing systems: Drupal, Daisy)

• Investigated DITA and identified it as a single-source solution for multi-version man pages and installation pages.
  
  
• Constructed a build process for man-page production. (Rake)
   
• Wrote the html2man utility to automate the construction of man pages from HTML file sources, preventing errors and increasing departmental efficiency. (Ruby)
  
  
• Set up a Subversion workspace for departmental collaboration. Configured Apache for WebDAV access. (Subversion, Apache, WebDAV)
   
• Evaluated DITA-based document-collaboration strategies. Wrote a paper on potential future uses that would take advantage of DITA's extensibility: Enabling Collaborative Design-and-Decision Discussions, Online
   
• Wrote the program that management used to reduce 8,000 broken links in 13,500 files, down to under 500. Set up a monthly cron job to run it. (Java, cron)  

Other

• Filled in for a missing writer and wrote the introductory materials for rich internet apps.
• Convinced management to make DreamWeaver available to improve efficiency and to help manage links.
• Reorganized directory hierarchies and proposed workspace strategies to allow for more extensive use of link-managing tools like DreamWeaver.
  
• Acted as a technical resource for the team of 12 writers, documenting procedures, establishing infrastructure.
• Managed production processes for 13,500 documents combined from half a dozen workspaces, and pushed to a variety of locations.
• Worked with the localization team to make sure they had they diffs they needed.
• To support the Java Community Process (JCP), wrote a series of scripts that used an HTML differencing tool to produce reviewable HTML "diff" pages. Ran it as needed for new releases. (TopBlend, CSH)

  Eric has an attitude of openness that invites others to think outside the box and consider opportunities to improve current processes.

Independent (2003-2005)

• Guide to Generics for version 1.5 of Sun's Java platform
• Java Web Start Guide for Sun. (116 pgs, 42 screen shots, 1 diagram).
• Java 1.3 to 1.5 Migration Guide for Sun.
• Unpublished manuscript: The Politics of Health: A general-systems examination of interlocking forces in our society.
• Established CitizensAdvisory.org to begin taking the money out of elections.
  

Sun Microsystems (1996-2004)

Acting as a consultant, wrote tutorials and API documentation, managed production processes, and built quality- improvement software. (Java, CodeGuide, Unit Testing)

• Development
  • CommentMerge: Merge comments from a compilable spec hierarchy into source files.
  • StubMaker: Extract comment-complete, compilable stubs from source files. Used by the Security team.
  • LinkCheck: Look for broken links and missing anchors, treating discrete sets of files as though co-located.
  • LinkFix: Changing HTML links en masse, using pattern-based substitutions.
  • DocCheck: Lint utility for API comments. (DocCheck release)
  • Glossary Servlet: Displaying and edit a localization glossary in any two of 9 different languages.
  • Utility library: Shared and generally-useful functionality for the above, including application templates, NIO routines, and a regular-expression processor for files and directories. (Regex-for-Files Library)
     
• Technical Writing
  • Reorganized and updated troubleshooting guides for application server product.
  • Revised and improved the Swing API descriptions.
     
• Other Acivities
  • Participated in Douglas Engelbart's Bootstrap Colloquium at Stanford (http://www.boostrap.org). Gave two talks.
  • Covered the Knowledge Technologies conference in Austin. Wrote a series of unpublished articles on the future implications and technological underpinnings of topic maps and the semantic web.
  • Automated localization procedures. (Perl, CSH)
  • Covered JavaOne conferences and wrote freelance articles for JavaWorld. 

Independent (1996)

• JBuilder 2 Bible. A tutorial published by IDG Press, targeted at beginning Java programmers, using the Borland JBuilder IDE. Includes an AI application (Othello) and a tree-structured personal project planner to predict completion dates.
   
• Software Development: Helped to construct a .NET-based demo and create a Protege ontology for a pre-funding startup. Explored the idea of ontology-based program generation. 
  

Additional Professional Experience

• Oracle: Technical Writing. Wrote conversion tools & a proofreading tool (MS Word).
• Reengineered a voice mail system. (PL/I)
  
• Founded a startup focused on building productivity software. Initial product was an outliner. Focused on product definition, marketing, and business development, while my partners focused on technology development.
• Played a significant role in landing contracts of $2m, $3m, and $6m for a large hardware vendor as a member of the Major Opportunities Team. Wrote demos, gave presentations, ran benchmarks, set up hardware, and provided general technical support for multi-million dollar opportunities.
• Created "vaporware" demos for a Colorized office automation system, simple voice messaging system.
• Wrote a multi-tasking emulation library and a code-profiling tool. Two reported bugs in two years. (SP/Pascal)

Professional Memberships

Education

Recent coursework and conferences:

• DITA-OT Training, 2008.
• JoAnn Hackos' DITA Bootcamp, 2007.
• Solaris System Administration I & II, Sun Microsystems, 2006.
• SDForum Ruby Conferences, Santa Clara, 2006, 2007.
• Knowledge Technologies Conference, 2004.
• Numerous JavaOne conferences since their inception.

Formal education:

• Post graduate work in pursuit of masters degree: Ohio State University: Computer Science
• BA, Ohio State University: Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, General Systems Theory, Mathematics. (Abstract Algebra, Topology, & Mathematical Logic).

Personal

• Software Development: AI Game Playing program (Othello). Original heuristics. Tie for 5th in international competition.
• Athletics: Played volleyball at highest amateur levels short of the Olympics. Gold and silver medals in Bay State games as player/coach. Black belt in martial arts.
• Writing: Articles on nutrition and fitness at TreeLight. Political-reform posts at Citizens' Advisory.
• Other Interests: Taiji, golf, cycling, Irish music, singing, sudoku, crosswords, cryptoquotes, chess.

References

• For references, see my LinkedIn page.
• For additional comments, see my Kudos collection.