Matthew Jason Benson mbenson@apache.org gudnabrsam

My ideal position is one in which my talents are used to develop, or develop build systems for, useful and/or interesting software. Strong written communications Ability to learn quickly and independently Always willing to help peers Java COBOL SQL Unix shell scripts Windows/DOS command scripts aka batch files Javascript PL-SQL Visual Basic under duress Apache Ant Apache Commons ANTLR 2.x Morph Spring framework Spring Web Flow Hibernate ORM JSP JSTL JSP custom tags Freemarker Dozer JUnit DWR AJAX library iText PDF library Struts 1 Threading Servlets JDBC Portlets RMI JMS Swing Oracle DB2 Pervasive/Btrieve v6.0-8.5 HP-PCL XML HTML UML Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 OS X Solaris Linux Cygwin MS-DOS Novell Netware 3.x-4.x Apache Ant CVS (user/admin) Subversion (user/some admin) PVCS PGP/GnuPG ghostScript ghostPcl Image Alchemy Bugzilla (user/admin) JIRA (user/admin) ViewVC (formerly ViewCVS - user/admin) LifePro MicroSoft Office Crystal Reports 6.x RTFM STFW Senior Program Analyst - Internet October 03 2005 Permanent General Assurance Corporation Developed a lightweight Java bean configuration package similar to an IOC container, but syntactically a compromise between Java and XML, motivated by the verbosity of the Spring framework's inversion of control (IOC) container. The ANTLR parser generator tool was used to develop the parser for the domain-specific language, whose syntax was focused on brevity. Some features included transparent collection conversion from generic or typed array syntax, best-match method invocation, prototype and parent beans a la Spring IOC, and a system of mapping objects via hierarchical keys to find, given e.g. an ordered set of properties, the best match in a set of configured objects. Developed an abstract Java library for working with flat file data structures in a pseudo-OO fashion, including a DSL to define flat file structures in a terse descendant of COBOL copybook syntax (Permanent General has made this library available via software grant to the Apache Commons sandbox, as the flatfile component. Development and maintenance of online insurance quote tools using Struts 1, Spring IOC/MVC/Web Flow, Hibernate, AJAX via DWR, Freemarker and JSP. CVSNT administration; implemented CVSNT email notification akin to that available for Unix CVS. JIRA administration. Senior Application Developer October 27 1998 September 30 2005 CNA Life/Valley Forge Life Developed a Spring Web MVC viewer for an Oracle database. Hibernate Object-Relational mapping was leveraged to resolve the database structure in terms of programming objects, and was supplemented by considerable amounts of custom SQL due to the complexity of the legacy data structure. Careful study of the Spring framework allowed greater flexibility with a smaller codebase than the company's prior Spring/Hibernate project. Primary designer/developer of a fast, flexible COBOL utility for extracting hundreds of thousands of policies' data from a (LifePro) Btrieve database in scant few hours. A particularly interesting component of this project: the COBOL-written expression parser that evaluated boolean expressions (including relational operators and grouping), compiling these from text to procedure pointer calls at runtime. Implemented an Ant-based build system for Net Express COBOL applications, including awareness of copybooks. Used MS Word macros to implement a seamless user experience uploading Word documents via servlets to JMS queues. Created a servlet-based JMS queue browser/editor as a development aid. Developed a Java-based reporting library to write arbitrary SQL resultset data to HTML and PDF formats, backed by the iText library. Varied reporting (ad-hoc and otherwise) against Oracle and Btrieve databases. Ongoing enhancements and modifications to a legacy PCL policy generation system. Apache Software Foundation From How the ASF works: A PMC member is a developer or a committer that was elected due to merit for the evolution of the project and demonstration of commitment. They have write access to the code repository, an apache.org mail address, the right to vote for the community-related decisions and the right to propose an active user for committership. The PMC as a whole is the entity that controls the project, nobody else. 16 August 2004 Apache Software Foundation From How the ASF works: A committer is a developer that was given write access to the code repository and has a signed Contributor License Agreement (CLA) on file. They have an apache.org mail address. Not needing to depend on other people for the patches, they are actually making short-term decisions for the project. 10 February 2004 15 August 2004 Apache Software Foundation The Jakarta project houses a number of Java subprojects. 2007 January Apache Software Foundation Set of independent and reusable Java libraries, formerly Apache Jakarta Commons. 2007 June Apache Software Foundation From How the ASF works: An ASF member is a person who was nominated by current members and elected due to merit for the evolution and progress of the foundation. 2007 December Apache Software Foundation From ASF Travel Assistance: The Travel Assistance Committee exists to help those that would like to attend ApacheCon events, but are unable to do so for financial reasons. 2008 September Morph object mapping framework Bug fixes and functionality enhancements. 2007 January Jext Java Text Editor Bug fixes and enhancements to the Swing user interface, core architecture and shipped plugins. 2000 2003 iText Java-PDF library iText is perhaps the most widely-used Java library for creating documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format. April 27 2001 October 31 2000 Associate of Applied Science Business Technology 17 December 1998 Nashville State Technical Institute 3.575 Graduated with honors High School June 1992 Hume-Fogg Academic High School 3.2 Graduated with honors I have an agile mind and an insatiable desire to know how and why systems work. I tend to be the first person to encounter limitations with a technology, but as a result have had to become skilled at finding solutions to such problems. I never shrink from an intellectual challenge, and take particular pleasure in making a system surpass its own limitations. I am an avid user of open-source software. I always assume that I am not the first person to need a tool to accomplish a particular task, and that a reliable open-source solution probably exists. I monitor the user lists of the projects I am most interested in, which yields the benefit of my having read many questions--and answers. Through my continuing interest in open source, I was elected first as a committer and later to the Project Management Committee of the Apache Software Foundation's Ant project. Membership in an Apache project is attained only as a result of positive impressions made on other project members; the ASF calls this principle Meritocracy. In 2007 I was elected as a committer to Apache Jakarta, and when Apache Commons left the Jakarta umbrella to become a top-level project of the foundation, I became a member of its founding PMC. In late 2007, my sustained contribution to the ASF was recognized by granting me foundation membership. My references are available on request. 06 October 2008