EDWARD J. POSNAK

Recruiters may contact me here

Summary

30+ years experience in systems design, software development, project management, and business development. I have designed, developed, and put into production several custom software systems including:

Bank of America’s NACHA interoperability pilot Bank of America’s Identrus public key infrastructure
BankServ’s customer public key infrastructure Bank of America’s employee public key infrastructure
Etracks’ distributed email infrastructure Bank of America’s corporate customer public key infrastructure
Nike’s Team Locker (social network) application Bank of America’s Smart Visa customer management system
CPO’s Crime Prevention Newsletter CPO’s Online Press Release Maker
NAAEP’s Virtual Emergency Operations Center NAAEP’s Online Disaster Preparedness Questionnaire
Lumentus Social’s SaaS Platform Marcom Central’s Social Media Publishing Module

Objective

I enjoy solving customer problems from design through implementation. An ideal position for me would involve working with customers, designing systems, and mentoring developers.

Education

  • Certificate in Digital Currencies, 2017, University of Nicosia. 95.5/100
  • MA Computer Science, 1996, University of Texas. Thesis: Presentation Processing Engines for Adaptive Multimedia Applications
  • BS Engineering (Computer Science), 1990, University of Florida

Work Experience

  • Oct 2017 to present Blockchain Technology Advisor. Under contract to Totle Inc. Detroit MI, and Quorum Control GmbH, Berlin DE
    Technology consultant and advisor to blockchain-based companies such as Quorum Control and Totle. I have been contracted to perform research, design solutions, and develop white papers and architectural specifications for Ethereum-based applications and ChainTree-based platforms.
  • Sep 2017 to present Author of On The Origin of Smart Contract Platforms. Researched and wrote comparisons of various smart contract platforms analyzing the ways each could disrupt and/or unseat the dominant platform
  • Feb 2017 to Aug 2017 Contributor to Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain, 2nd Edition
    Made technical fixes and clarifications related to the functions of state channels and Bitcoin scripting mechanisms (checksequenceverify, checklocktimeverify, nSequence, nLocktime).

  • Nov 2011 to Nov 2016 CTO/Developer/Product Owner/Sales. Under contract to Lumentus Social, New York, NY
    Designed and built original implementation of the Lumentus Social platform. Worked closely with the client on product strategy and requirements, and creating implementable stories that fit within a cohesive, scalable, architecture. Lead a small team of developers in building out features, including data acquisition, social broadcasting, interaction tracking, gamification, etc. Directed product strategy and executed integration partnerships from sales to delivery
  • Aug 2010 to Nov 2011 Software Developer/Architect. Under contract to Fidelity Life Assurance, Chicago IL
    Assessed maintainability, reliability, scalability, and performance issues with existing system. Designed and implemented distributed management system to simplify and improve reliability of production system consisting of 250+ distributed processes. Converted configuration from local files to network service to simplify configuration management. Designed and implemented threaded architecture to reduce resource utilization and facilitate scaling. Redesigned and refactored code to remove duplication at all levels and improve maintainability.
  • Jan 2010 to Oct 2010 Software Development Coach. Under contract to Recontek Systems, San Francisco, CA
    Part-time design review, monitoring, and mentoring of a small team of developers creating a new product from the ground up. Facilitated communication between business and developers.
  • Nov 2009 to Aug 2010 Web Developer. Under contract to Crime Prevention Outreach, Santa Cruz, CA
    Designed and developed an integrated suite of online services used by Police Departments to create, for example, customized monthly newsletters and press releases with images and video. This suite contains extensive administrative interface to manage content, services, subscriptions, subscribers, and users and to perform service-specific administration.
  • Mar 2009 to Jul 2009 Software Developer. Under contract to Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park, CA
    Ported open-source implementation of BIND server and resolver libraries to Solaris.
  • May 2007 to Jun 2013 Web Developer. Under contract to Native American Alliance For Emergency Preparedness, San Diego, CA
    Developed an online emergency management application that facilitates location of facilities and resources around an incident and enables communication of status updates in real time as a situation unfolds. The solution consists of a few different web applications that integrate a backend database with front end maps and other display, editing, and control widgets. Developed an online disaster preparedness questionnaire. The application stores contact info and survey answers for participating California clinics in a database and provides password management, online help, and reporting features.
  • Aug 2006 to Mar 2007 Software Developer/Architect. Under contract to Nike Corporation, Beaverton OR
    Designed, developed and put into production backend services to support an interactive online community application for designing personalized shoes and other products. Designed and implemented architectural changes to existing code base to improve maintainability, enable choice of underlying technologies, and facilitate implementation of new services and features.
  • Feb 2006 Software Developer. Under contract to Thetus Corporation, Portland, OR
    Designed and developed a proof of concept application using an RDF/OWL-based knowledge system. The application demonstrated how the knowledge system could be used to integrate data from different SQL databases, automate existing business processes, and simplify the development powerful new knowledge discovery tools.
  • Feb 2003 to Feb 2007 Board Member/Webmaster/Software Developer. Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, San Diego CA
    Designed, developed and maintained the San Diego chapter website jdrf-sandiego-news.org Wrote software for and participated in various fundraising activities and events.
  • Jan 2003 to Dec 2005 Author. Sugarcoating Diabetes: The Empowering Truth About Diet, Supplements, and Drugs
    Researched and wrote an expose of the dangers of diabetes misinformation generated the pharmaceutical, wellness, and food industries. Wrote software to support this project.
  • Jan 1994 to Oct 2002 Principal Consultant/Founder. Xetex Inc. Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA
    Designed and built infrastructure for supporting issuance and management of Smart Visa Cards at a major financial institution. The infrastructure maintains a directory of cardholders and serves as an information conduit among the card personalization bureau, fulfillment bureau, web authentication system, loyalty program, and card application management system. The infrastructure also includes administrative applications for unblocking cards and providing customer service support.
    Designed and built four directory-based Public Key Infrastructures for major financial institutions. PKI implementations typically included development of custom schema, integration of directory-enabled PKI applications, and development of digital certificate issuance and management applications. Designed and led the development of a reusable development framework that enabled rapid development of these systems and schema-independent integration of directory applications.
    Developed software that enabled merchants to obtain from their bank signature verification and certificate path validation services that would guarantee the non-repudiation of digitally signed customer purchase orders.
    Developed business for Xetex and partners through onsite consulting activities in which solutions to customer problems were sketched out in initial meeting. Customers appreciated my focus on understanding their needs and addressing them right away with creative solutions. Developed close working relationships with customers and was often treated more like a staff member than an outside consultant.
  • Aug 1993 to Jun 1997 Graduate Research Assistant / PhD Student.
    Distributed Multimedia Computing Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. Conducted research in multimedia-aware operating systems design. Developed a framework for building multimedia applications that can adapt the quality of presentation to match user preferences and availability of processing resources. (See Research Summary). Used framework to develop adaptive browser plugin and graphical media player. Developed other systems software such as a kernel implementation of sockets, multimedia filesystem interface, and video transport protocols.
  • May 1990 to Aug 1993 Software Engineer. Harris Corporation, Melbourne, Florida
    Developed POSIX layer for NASA launch processing system. Developed simulation models of custom hardware and launch processing system to support component and overall system design.
  • Oct 1989 to May 1990 Unix System Administrator. Innovative Nuclear Space Power Institute at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
    Managed a local area network of Sun Workstations, Macintoshes and PCs. Developed system administration tools.
  • May 1988 – Aug 1988 Programmer. IBM at Boca Raton, Florida
    Developed test tools for IBM PS/2 products.
  • May 1987 – Dec 1987 Programmer. IBM at Research Triangle Park, NC
    Developed analysis tools for IBM Token Ring products.

Interests

Decentralized applications and organizations, distributed systems design, communications protocols, adaptive systems, simulation and modeling, and computer security.

Technologies

Recent: Ethereum, Python, Ruby, Rails, Grape, JSON, Javascript, JQuery, AJAX, CSS, SQL, HTML, HTTP
Past: Java, Servlets, XML, DOM, SAX, Perl, CGI, JSP, C++, C, Sockets, SOAP, ATM, JPEG, MPEG, TCP/IP, LDAP, PKIX, SSL/TLS, X.500, X.509, ASN.1, PKCS, OCSP, PKI

Research Summary

My graduate research focused on issues in network and operating systems support for multimedia with a view towards how object-oriented technologies can be applied. As part of this research I developed a reusable framework for implementing multimedia applications that decouples performance-sensitive stream decoding from the application. This allows different implementations of decoding algorithms to be used interchangeably to adapt the application to the wide range of end station capabilities, changing conditions, and user preferences.

Publications