Chris Coldwell

BC Assessment

Technical risk evaluation, a North Star technical architecture, and a set of enterprise strategies (data governance, master data management, external data sharing, data science, cloud, geospatial and assessment intelligence) tied together in a strategy-to-capability roadmap. Followed by contextual operational modelling.

IFS Copperleaf

Assessment of the technology and product organization against the commercial and technical roadmap, followed by ongoing roadmap and architecture enablement for R&D.

BC Ministry of Citizens' Services - BC Registries

Agile business analysts and quality assurance specialists embedded with the BC Registries development teams, plus a digital platform architecture review for the SBC Connect platform.

Technical Due Diligence for Investors

Red-flag, pre-diligence and full technical due diligence, 100-day planning and diligence tooling for investors including Pender Software Holdings, Pender Private Equity, Berenson and Three Hills Capital Partners.

Fremedica Technologies (Nikki)

Design and development of a self-service customer portal, from MVP through affiliate and administration features.

Government of Alberta - Digital Innovation Office / Justice Digital

Data microservices architecture and a legacy retirement roadmap, and business modelling of the justice system from court appearances to bail and prosecution services.

Royal Printers

Diagnostic assessment and strategic technology roadmap, followed by a phased rebuild of their operations system, starting with an expert-system quoting tool.

Association of Ontario Land Surveyors

Membership management portal based on the system built for ABCLS, delivered as a subscription service.

Alcanza Clinical Research

Integration and data architecture for a central clinical-trial data warehouse, with governance for health information, plus Power BI development.

iTradeNetwork

Architecture and organizational assessment across all platforms and products, followed by lead architect and interim executive support.

Swift Medical with Global Talent Accelerator

Technical oversight review and support for a rebuild of the platform on Azure.

Novari Health with Outforce

Software engineering support for the Novari development team.

Infusion Edutainment

Review of code and architecture, proposed solution and software architecture, gap analysis and roadmap.

Chartered Professional Accountants of British Columbia (CPABC)

Assessment of requirements, risks and options for the selection of a new association management system.

Backroads

Assessment of an RFP approach and potential future system architectures.

Granite Telecommunications with Crosslake

Agile transformation and technical debt reduction strategies for a core ordering and provisioning platform.

Teaching Strategies with Crosslake

Platform modernization.

Lynx Technology Partners

Platform assessment and architectural transition plan, followed by an interim virtual CTO role.

nuPSYS

Independent customer ROI analysis for data centre and IoT visualization products.

FOCOS Innovations

Tactical assessment of development people, process and technology, followed by product development.

Association of British Columbia Land Surveyors (ABCLS)

Systems assessment and requirements, then development and ongoing maintenance of a unified member and public system.

PharmID

DevOps and infrastructure services.

Scouted

Development of an experience marketplace web application.

Ensemble Health Partners with Crosslake

Azure public cloud technology strategy across infrastructure, data ingestion, operations and business intelligence.

Diligent with Crosslake

Multi-site Artifactory architecture for a CI/CD transformation.

Audacious Inquiry with Crosslake

Identification and reduction of technical debt

• Project Management on Quicksilver side
• Quality Control

Behavioural Health Works with Crosslake

Implementation of Scheduling Optimization

• Business and Technical Analysis
• Software Engineering
• Modelling
• Cloud Development

Healix LLC with Crosslake

Architectural Transformation and Enterprise Integration

• Project Leadership
• Business Analysis
• Architecture and Software Engineering
• Cloud Development

Nuspire with Crosslake

Architectural Transformation

• Project Leadership
• Business and Technical Analysis
• Architecture and Software Engineering
• Cloud Development

Ministry of Justice - Court Scheduling

• Member of development team for the Court Clerk Desktop project
• Development of HTML5 application elements for project
• Development of controls and local storage extensions

Crosslake Technologies

Project Recovery and Software engineering assistance

Granite Software

One of the chief advancements I developed for this client was the lexical conversion of their old Multi-User Basic code into Perl. This included writing a windowing system, an in-memory ISAM system, and the conversion tool itself. The conversion would also identify areas of code that would need refactoring and attempt to perform the refactoring automatically as part of the process. It also attempted to identify areas of code that contained critical business logic. The reason for writing the converter was that the client had hundreds of thousands of lines of code, written by several authors, in an unsupported language and no remaining people who understood all the business logic encapsulated therein.

Three Trees

Assistance with several projects

AuditData

Bregal Sagemount / Carbon

Providence Equity / Classroom

EQT Partners - Tesla

Columbus Nova / NupSys

KKR - Pinnacle

Francisco Partners - Optimize

EQT Partners - Purpose / Ironman

Sawmill Capital - Accolade

EQT Partners - Derby

Great Hill Partners - Popup

Thompson Street Capital Partners

Apax Partners

Zynergy Capital

Zynergy Capital (formerly Repower Capital) is a company that links renewable energy projects to sources of capital and reduces the time necessary for due diligence on the part of the financier. They are backed by Siemens Financial Services. We developed the application that supports the business as well as performs the innovative analysis on project information in order to reduce the time and complexity of making financing deals. The system is AI and NLP ready with several innovations scheduled for future releases.

• Senior architect and engineer
• Development of special security layers
• Development of mathematical processing tools
• Development of network-based processing tools

MOE - Environmental Assessment

This application was immense and would make a good case study. However, we delivered a production public commenting system born from the original code in less than 4 weeks, then went on to deliver the full working system only a few months later with a team of four. There were some excellent innovations in this code.

• Primary architect and engineer
• Secondary business analyst

Ministry of Justice - Provincial Court Scheduling

Only worked as a small part of a much larger team with Quartech Systems.

• Various bits and pieces helping out with project, mostly developing controls
• Tiny bit of work with developing BI output from new application

Court Services Branch

The purpose of this engagement was to develop a small prototype and a white paper illustrating how advanced computational intelligence methods could assist all levels of court with scheduling. This would not be one level of court in isolation, but rather the entire court system, including all actors required such as Judges, Lawyers, Witnesses, Clerks, Sheriffs, etc. The prototype also included advanced data visualization and data interaction techniques for dealing with large amounts of complex information in an intuitive way.

• Computational Intelligence
• Non-deterministic constraints-based solvers
• Advanced SVG data visualization and Interaction

Granite Software

The primary work for Granite was taking what was learned from the lexical conversion process and turning it into an MUB compiler/interpreter that could run on any modern *nix machine. This would enable companies using the old mini-computers with MUB to port and run their code, as-is, on a modern platform

• Compiler / Interpreter building (non-standard grammar)
• Data and Algorithm optimization

Ministry of Justice - Court Clerk Desktop

This project was spawned as a result of the technical analysis I did for the Court Services Branch. The leadership there decided to go with the most modern approach at the time, using HTML5 and a single page application in conjunction with some server side tools combining data and third party services into one rest API. The sub contract chain went through Sierra Systems and Quartech Systems

• Member of development team for the Court Clerk Desktop project
• Development of HTML5 application elements for project
• Development of controls and local storage extensions

Ministry of Justice, Court Services Branch

The final artifact of this engagement was an analysis of the current proposed architectures, strengths and weaknesses, and comparison to other potential architectures. This included risk analyses based on specific organizational criteria.

• Consultation on technology platforms and architectures for various projects
• Delivery of report detailing analysis and comparison of architectures along with recommendations

Neverblue Media

I was essentially the skunk works for Neverblue

• Design and development of mobile preview tool for mobile campaigns
• Design and development of fast mobile redirect tools
• Design of intelligent redirect system (distributed processing / networked system)
• Development of fast, domain specific memory cache
• Development of fast, domain specific, unique key generator
• Design and Development of the PMP system, a real-time rules engine, AI ready, and associated communication modules used for traffic partitioning and context sensitive content delivery
• Design and development of a probabilistic based device recognition engine
• Experimentation with CPU fingerprinting
• Experimentation with SSL fingerprinting
• Experimentation with clock-skew fingerprinting

Rock Bay Media

• Design and development of mobile publishing tools and frameworks
• Development of 'The Uninvited' iPhone application and several prototypes

Proxisafe Systems

This project had an installation partner in Arkansas who is a larger scale manufacturer of electrical grid components. They are a fast pace manufacturing plant with many large machines and high forklift and pedestrian traffic. The safety system we were designing was initially developed to sit on both forklifts and people. If the system predicted a collision it would notify the human user though vibration and sound of a worn device. The system could also sound the horn on the forklift as well as flash its lights. In extreme cases of imminent collision, the forklift engine could be shut off and brakes engaged.

• Design and development of a full-scale safety system for industrial applications
• (Almost) real-time analysis of spatial data from any number of objects
• Development and refinement of mathematical algorithms for prediction and collision
• Assisting with firmware and hardware design wherever needed
• Linux,Windows,C/C++

Granite Software

One of the chief advancements I developed for this client was the lexical conversion of their old Multi-User Basic code into Perl. This included writing a windowing system, an in-memory ISAM system, and the conversion tool itself. The conversion would also identify areas of code that would need refactoring and attempt to perform the refactoring automatically as part of the process. It also attempted to identify areas of code that contained critical business logic. The reason for writing the converter was that the client had hundreds of thousands of lines of code, written by several authors, in an unsupported language and no remaining people who understood all the business logic encapsulated therein.

• Online Accounts Receivable portal for clients to view outstanding accounts (PHP/MySQL)
• Development of a large-scale native inventory control system (Linux,C,MySQL)
• Development of POS terminal client/server modules (Linux,C)
• Development of language converter to port multi-user-basic modules to Perl

E-Crew Media

• Various upgrades and enhancements to ColdFusion CMS for Basketball Ontario
• Analysis and upgrades to PHP CMS for Oslebrook
• Online PHP coupon application for Grey County
• Online PDF Document designer and generator for Alberta Athletic Association
• ColdFusion,PHP,Windows,Linux,HTML,XML,JavaScript,Ajax,MySQL,MSSQL

Day 21 Studios

This was the first time I wrote a game from end to end. I wrote all the code, designed better timers, memory management, algorithms for movement and hit detection, etc. I also learned how much game balancers can affect the playability of a game.

• Design and Development of Undead City, an online tower defence style game written in Flex/ActionScript 3
• Game Play development, engine development, optimization, etc
• ActionScript,Flex,Flash,XML,JavaScript

Inspektech

• Analysis and modifications to massive PHP site
• Linux,PHP,MySQL

Art Channel

• Application of engineering principles to projects to ensure continuity and maintainability
• Algorithm design
• Network and business process design
• Flex / AS3 component development
• ActionScript,Flex,Flash,Perl,XML,Objective-C,Cocoa

UDUTU

• Design and development of flash applications for online course delivery
• Updates to C# web services
• Flash,C#

Advanced Book Exchange (Abebooks)

My initial work with ABE was helping to build small, fast server components that could interface with the AltaVista keyword search modules they were using. After that I built HomeBase, the second generation of the in-store inventory management system that allowed booksellers to manage their store and also publish books online to ABE. Later on, Mercurial did other work for ABE as well once it was purchased by Amazon.

BC Children's Commission

The work at the Children's Commission was very rewarding. They had several disparate business areas that performed interrelated services without good data interchange and cross-reference. I spent many days interviewing and following staff through their work days before starting on an abstracted case management software tool that allowed each area to maintain or improve its business workflow, while keeping all records and data in a centralized format with proper security – while still indicating vital cross-references that otherwise could go unnoticed due to physical security constraints, or simply not sharing data.

Linden Labs

Linden Labs was stuck on an aspect of Second Life. They wanted to display content on screens in the game, as though characters were watching television for example. Mercurial was tasked with solving this problem. It was done by skewing video, but there were issues causing jumps during rendering. This was solved, very simply, by rendering first into the screen buffer, but off physical screen, then mapping into the physical boundaries once complete.

MacDonald Dettwiler

MacDonald Dettwiler was porting an IMS mainframe application to the web. I was on the dev team for this. It was accomplished by hooking into the IMS rendering buffer and translating the IMS screen definitions into HTML. The most difficult part of this process was mapping responses back from the HTML to the appropriate action for IMS. In the end this strategy paid off and the transition was successful.

AOL / Mozilla / Netscape

AOL Time Warner purchased Netscape and was working with the Mozilla foundation. We were hired to merge the rendering engine (Trident) from Microsoft with the Mozilla version (Gecko) into one browser. This was version 8 of Netscape. There were many ideas as to how to integrate the two engines which entailed many long debates and white board sessions. The project team was upwards of 60 people working on various aspects of the browser and related tech. The integration was successful, and we released several versions ending up in version 8.1.3. The decision to include the Trident engine was very controversial, and not supported by Mozilla; which was why we were contracted to perform the work. This was definitely the largest project we ever worked on.

Boeing / Eventra

I was hired by Eventra, of Connecticut, to oversee the installation of their software at Boeing’s Kent Space Centre in Washington state. As a foreign national, I was not allowed to directly interact with any systems there, so I was assigned engineers who would take instruction. The task was to go from bare metal to a full working installation in three successive iterations. This was the first time I had to apply such rigorous engineering to a seemingly simple task. It goes without saying that the exercise took much longer than anticipated, but Eventra's installation scripts were bullet-proof by the end. But most importantly, I got to go to work every day in a helicopter! Wow!

The Doctors Company

The Doctors Company had a project that had gone sideways and needed a new team to complete the work. We partnered with a San Diego company to deliver the product. The team comprised of 30-40 people in numerous teams, working in Canada, the US and Brazil. It was an extremely challenging project for many reasons and one where I learned a great deal.

The Ministry of Health

For this engagement I was able to work with the MasPar (massive parallel processing) system, processing univariate files with billions of rows of data. I was responsible for writing and maintaining a host of ETL processes over multiple platforms and machines that coalesced data for various analyses. I wrote a domain specific language to coordinate all the ETL processes and provide processing meta-data instructions to them. The DSL could pull data from remote sources, transform it as per language instructions, and also combine sources as needed and in whatever format was required. The underlying interpreter included custom-written RPC clients and servers written in platform specific languages and able to run processes required on each platform. New processes could be easily written and plugged in to the interpreter and then made available in the DSL. I also had my first spectacular failure here – you can ask me about it in person =)

Wireless Energy Innovations

Wireless Energy was far, far ahead of its time. We were contracted to build a system that would deliver recommendations to mobile phone users based on time, place and purpose. For (a simplistic) example, if we knew the user liked coffee, and was between meetings, we would recommend local coffee shops. This functionality now exists with modern phones and Google services. However, in 2000 this was unheard of. We were working on natural language processing, predictive AI, and interfacing with disparate mobile applications. The project was moving forward successfully, but investors, and interestingly carriers, eventually did not believe that the vision was possible. The founders, wherever they are now, can very rightly say they were clearly right in their vision – and we all missed out on what is now a very real opportunity.

Ministry of Health

Multiple projects over different placements, using various MVS languages, Perl and SAS on multiple platforms.

• BC Ambulance
• Practitioner Profiles
• MSP Audit

Pharmacare

Various Updates and changes to code driven by policy decisions, end of year, mostly MVS work

BC Systems Corporation

Continuation of previous work with MVS administration plus additional duties as directed

Ministry of Transportation and Highways

Worked during the large multi-project ICBC / Transportation years on almost all projects running at the time

• Weigh Scales
• Photo Radar
• New Drivers Licence
• IMS security and TCP/IP implementations
• Data Analysis

Ministry of Finance and Administration

Changes to code driven by policy decisions, end of year, mostly MVS and Unix