Douglas Alan

Home Address
9 Charles Road
Winchester, MA 01890
(617) 401-7172

Email: doug AT alum.mit.edu 

Work Address
Broad Institute
RNAi Informatics

7 Cambridge Center, Room 2025-A 
Cambridge, MA 02142

(617) 714-7232

Professional
objective

Object-oriented software analysis, design, and implementation, in an intellectually stimulating environment.

Have a great deal of experience with and passion for implementing high quality, maintainable code and systems.

Summary

• MIT graduate. GPA: 4.5 out of 5.0.
• 23 years industry experience, including:
• 15 years object-oriented programming experience.
• 8 years experience architecting and administrating large networks of Unix & Linux workstations.
  

Programming
languages

• C++ (9 years)
  

• Python (4 years)
• Gave a tutorial on Python for BBLISA.
• Lisp (1 year)
• Processing (½ year)
  

• JavaScript (w/ jQuery, jQuery UI, Django, and Postgres, 1 year)
• Java (½ year)
• Bourne Shell (1 year)
• SQL
  
• Others: XSLT, sendmail.cf, CLU, Perl, DECsystem-20 assembler, PDP-11 assembler, Basic, Algol, and APL.

Skills

• Unix and Linux wizard-level expertise and strong familiarity with Mac OS X and Windows.
• Ajax development.
• Interactive data visualization.
• A keen interest in programming languages and "reusable code".
• Distributed version control using Mercurial (hg) and BitKeeper (and bitbucket.org and Google Code).
• Familiar with "agile" development techniques.
  
• Libraries: Beautiful Soup (for web scraping), ITK, Tk, sockets, Google Maps API & KML, CFITSIO, jQuery, jQuery UI, Django, PIL, NumPy, matplotlib, gnuplot, Ext JS, BLT, AWT.
• Other misc technologies: HTML, CSS, Blueprint CSS framework, Postgres query performance analysis, FITS (Flexible Image Transport), CGI, XML, XSLT, Apache HTTP Server, HPC clusters, parallel filesystems, NFS, rsync, EDI X12/xCBL, linear coordinate frame transformations.
• Java/AWT and Python/Tk GUI development.
• Unix and Linux systems engineering and systems administration.
• Familiarity with UML, Booch, and OMT notations.
• Socket-based TCP/IP development.
• Build engineering using CMake and GNU Make.
• Supervised student programmers and operators.
• Delivered several talks to BBLISA, the Boston area large installation systems administration special interest group.
• Email systems (e.g., wrote a more elegant sendmail.cf from scratch).

Software development
projects

Designed, implemented, and maintained: 

• An attractive and highly interactive web-based Ajax GUI search interface to an astronomy time series database.  The interface includes tooltips, a user's guide, sliders, draggable dialog boxes, mouse highlighting between table results and a Google Sky pane, and pop-up thumbnail previews of light curves. This was developed in Javascript, using jQuery, jQuery UI, HTML, CSS, Blueprint CSS framework, Ext JS, and JSON with a Django and Postgres-based backend. [Harvard IIC]
• Analyzed Postgres database performance and improved speed of some common queries by orders of magnitude.
  
• Enhancements to a brain imaging application (3D Slicer) to allow it to support visualization of multidimensional astronomical data (i.e., spectral line data cubes). [Harvard IIC]
  
• X-ray space telescope configuration subsystem. My work on the $300+ million NASA project was essential for its operation. It (1) provides a configuration language allowing astronomers to specify the complex operating parameters of the telescope, (2) maintains a database of such configurations, (3) remotely manages the memory of the satellite’s on-board computer system, (4) reconstructs configurations from downlinked telemetry, and (5) calculates accurate exposure times from packet data.  This software was essential for the publication of more than 1400 peer-reviewed journal papers. [MIT CSR]
• Browser-based Java applet for visualizing dendrogram representations of  spectral line data cubes. (You can try out the applet here.) [Harvard IIC]
• GUI experiment session manager for a virtual reality environment planned for deployment on the International Space Station. [MIT CSR]
• XSLT program to convert purchase orders in TrustedLink Enterprise’s proprietary XML format to the standard xCBL 3.5 XML format. [MIT IS&T]
• Several GUI programs to monitor and graphically plot data arriving in real-time from the RXTE x-ray space telescope. [MIT CSR]
• General-purpose C++ template class library, including reference-counting smart pointers (non-intrusive, and inheritance-respecting intrusive), dynamically expanding arrays and deques, high-level strings, parsing tools, and an exception system for use with C++ compilers that don’t support exceptions. The template classes were specially coded so as not to cause code bloat and not to invoke C-front’s troublesome link-time template instantiator. [MIT CSR]
• Socket-based rdist-like TCP/IP file transfer and synchronization utility. [MIT CSR]
• Grid-like modular queuing system for parallel scientific data processing. The queue monitor communicates with processing modules via IPC. [MIT CSR]
• Scientific data-filtering tool with an embedded Perl interpreter. [MIT CSR]
• Scripts to present a higher-level CVS-like interface to RCS. [MIT CSR]
• A sendmail.cf from scratch, taking a new, cleaner approach. Gave talk on my design to BBLISA. [MIT EECS]
• Simple object-oriented database engine and user-friendly front end. [MIT EECS]
• Robust and user-friendly backup system for networked Unix file servers.  (Gave talk on this to BBLISA.) [MIT Media Lab]
• Unix workstation OS installation system. Loads and configures OS and other software onto new Unix workstations via the network with minimal human intervention. [MIT Media Lab, MIT CSR]
• Exception handling subsystem for Lisp. [MIT EECS]
• Simple and efficient object-oriented programming subsystem for Lisp. [MIT EECS]

Maintained and enhanced:

• Packet-based telemetry receiving and processing subsystem for RXTE space telescope. [MIT CSR]
• Chandra x-ray CCD simulation program. [MIT CSR]

Designed:

• The boot filesystem (with locking and crash recovery) for Unix System V.4. [Consulting]
• Doxygen-like program to extract specially formatted comments from C++ code and turn them into documentation (Unix “man” pages).  Supervised the development of this tool. [MIT CSR]
• What I believe to be the first completely robust lock-file method for NFS. [MIT CSR]

Unix systems engineering &

administration

See systems engineering addendum.

Employment 
history

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (April 2006-present):

• Senior Scientific Software Engineer, Initiative in Innovative Computing.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (Feb. 1986-April 2006):

• Programmer/Analyst III, Information Services and Technology (May 2005-April 2006).
• Software Engineer, Center for Space Research, XTE Project (Sep. 1993-May 2005). 
• Systems Programmer, Media Laboratory (Apr. 1990-Aug. 1993). 
• Programmer/Analyst and Assistant Manager, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Educational Computer Facilities (Dec. 1987-Mar. 1990).
• Systems Programmer II, Project Athena (Feb. 1986-Nov. 1987).

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undergraduate. 1980-1985: Studied computer science and cognitive science. Received S.B. in cognitive science from the Philosophy and Linguistics Dept. with a concentration in AI. Worked during semesters and summers as a systems administrator. Received an A in every class involving programming or programming languages. GPA: 4.5 out of 5.0. Invited into HKN honor society. Accepted into BU’s Computer Science PhD program with a full fellowship.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduate. 1991-1992: Special Graduate Student, Media Laboratory. Spring, 1998: Special Graduate Student, Linguistics and Philosophy. Spring 2001: Special Graduate Student, EECS Department.

Harvard University Extension, graduate. Spring 1993.

Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Spring 2008: Special Graduate Student. Spring 2009: Teaching Fellow.

Computer Science course work:

• Undergraduate at MIT:
  
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (A+)
• Laboratory in Software Engineering (A)
• Computer Language Engineering (A); i.e., compiler design and implementation)
  
• Theory of Computation (A)
• Computation Structures (B); i.e., architecture of digital hardware
  
• Digital Design Lab (B)
• Graduate (at MIT, except where noted):
  
• Programming Languages (A)
• Perception, Semanticity, and Statistically Emergent Mentality (A); i.e., artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology
  
• Society of Mind (A); i.e., artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology
  
• Advanced Object-Oriented Programming in C++ (A); i.e., OO analysis, design, and implementation, using Booch's methodology.  (Harvard Extension. The teaching fellow said that my code was the best he's ever seen and offered me a job.)
  
• Dynamic Language Exploration (A+); i.e. design and implementation of object-oriented dynamic languages that support multimethods (A+)
• Visualization (A): interactive data visualization programming. (Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.)
  
• Teaching Fellow for above class

GRE: Scored in the top 10% on the Computer Science GRE and in the top 5% on both the verbal and quantitative GRE. 

Publications

Michelle Borkin, Alyssa Goodman, Douglas Alan, Jens Kauffmann, & Michael Halle, "Application of Medical Imaging to the 3D Visualization of Astronomy Data", 10/2007, Proceedings of IEEE Visualization Conference (Vis 2007).

Personal
background

Born in Manhattan and brought up in White Plains, NY. For three years DJ’ed a biweekly radio show on WMBR. Founded and moderate a large music-oriented Internet mailing list and Usenet newsgroup. Enjoy progressive music, art, film, science fiction, and analytic philosophy of mind. NAUI-certified scuba diver. Favorite film is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.