PA Consulting

Senior Consultant

Ivanti

Staff Software Engineer

Pulse Secure

Pulse Secure wanted vADC (rebranded as Virtual Traffic Manager) to be the the ingress controller for the cloud based SaaS controller of their new Zero Trust Access product, and I moved to the new Platform Infrastructure Foundation team, which I am currently the Scrum Master for.

Ivanti acquired Pulse in December 2020, and the product is now Ivanti Neurons for Zero Trust Access

The ZTA controller platform uses Azure Kubernetes Service. Work included deployment of Azure PostgreSQL server with Azure private link using Terraform, use of pgBouncer within the cluster for connection pooling, tooling to provide per-microservice credentials with design and testing of associated disaster recovery procedures and assisting the micro-service teams with their use, design of tenant separation defence in depth features, a Golang Kubernetes controller to run per-tenant schema creation jobs (with proof of concept migration to using Argo Workflow), work on the Jenkins Continuous Integration pipeline and GitOps based Continuous Delivery system, investigative work on use of distributed databases and service mesh (not adopted as part of the product) and Kubernetes network policies (which were), and assorted related support work for the platform as a whole (such as updating Terraform provider use to support the breaking changes from 0.12 to 0.13).

Pulse were acquired by Ivanti
https://www.ivanti.co.uk/company/press-releases/2020/ivanti-acquires-mobileiron-and-pulse-secure

Software Engineer

Brocade

Brocade sold the business to Pulse Secure when Brocade were acquired by Broadcom.
https://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsysm/brocade-sells-vadc-to-pulse-secure-vyatta-to-att.html

Riverbed Technology

Working on the Application Delivery Controller, initially on the Aptimizer (Web Content Optimizer) team, later on the Performance and Security Team. Work included updating the codebase to C++11, profiling memory usage, updating supported TLS versions, Kerberos Constrained Delegation, update of PKCS#11 HSM support, responding to security vulnerabilities, and various build system improvements such as making the cache of 3rd party packages safe for access by concurrent builds and removing some of the layers of recursive make.

I also played a major part in converting an in-house build and test system tied to Perforce to a Jenkins based one when we migrated to git. This included parallelising the existing test system, adding coverage instrumented builds, and builds using cppcheck and clang in parallel with the main gcc build for additional checks and warnings.

Also helped with organising recruitment fairs and hackathons.

Riverbed sold the ADC business to Broadcom in 2015. In 2017 Brocade were bought by Broadcom and committed to divesting the IP Networking business unit because other parts of it competed with some Broadcom customers. The ADC product was formerly Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager, branded by Riverbed as Stingray and then SteelApp, and Brocade as vADC.

Transferred to Brocade when they bought the business from Riverbed.
http://newsroom.brocade.com/press-releases/brocade-completes-the-acquisition-of-the-steelapp--nasdaq-brcd-1179466
http://www.riverbed.com/about/news-articles/press-releases/Brocade-Announces-Intent-to-Acquire-Riverbed-Technology-SteelApp-Business.html

"Member of Technical Staff" (Software Engineer)

Thales e-Security

Most recently working as lead of a small sub-team working on providing replication services for an Informix database, using C# with Mono on Linux as part of a large project to write a next generation product, which was eventually cancelled (after I had left). There was a requirement to make the database available (including write access) even when connectivity to other clusters was lost, so eventual consistency potentially required manual intervention.

I introduced use of virtual machines by the team for testing.

Before that I worked on a middleware server providing a common API for use by PKCS#11, MS-CAPI and CAPI-NG providers for the new project, including a working proof of concept based on the older HSM software.

I also provided advice and help to the team who maintained the older product, and other teams within the new project.

nCipher were acquired by Thales e-Security in 2008, and is now part of Entrust

Senior Software Engineer/Technical Lead

nCipher plc

I developed a PKCS #11 interface for nCipher HSMs, some work on an MS-CAPI provider (which became the first commercial non-Microsoft CAPI provider), and wrote the nCipher CryptoAPI NextGen provider, which was developed in time for the launch of Windows Server 2008.

PKCS #11 work has included working with customers and partners, and participating in RSA PKCS workshops.

I also worked on introducing the nForce Ultra SSL offload product (since obsoleted, but it had an interesting architecture) and on the keyAuthority key management system (including Python GUI work).

I also worked on the build system, using Cygwin to support a common environment for Windows and Unix builds.

Senior Software Engineer

Setanta Software

I joined Setanta Software to work on Print.Flow, a work flow monitoring product initially targeted at pre-press printing based on an object-relational active database.

The main database client was written in C with a GUI toolkit that ran on X Windows, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS, and there were additional tools written in Borland Delphi. There were also tools to export information as HTML pages, and to interface with other systems, for example taking information from a Sybase database using ODBC. I worked on all these parts of the system, as well as the source management system and development tracking system (which used the same database). Work was in a small development team with no management structure.

I was also at times webmaster for Setanta's web site (some fragments of which are in the Wayback Machine, but Setanta no longer exists).

Shape Data

I joined Shape Data as part of a team working on an object-oriented interface on top of relational databases (Oracle, Ingress, and RDB), written in C and embedded and dynamic SQL, for a product that ended up as IMAN (Information Manager) after a number of name changes, but is currently Teamcenter Engineering. Work included writing a test framework. I then moved to the N-able team, a project to explore architectures for a possible new product, working in C++ with an object-oriented database (ObjectStore).

The areas examined included reflexive data modelling, combining method dispatch with remote procedure calls, and journalling/undo/update. This job also involved some training of other team members. N-able produced some prototypes, but it was decided to divert work to the existing product, Unigraphics (now NX) and I became part of the Assemblies team. New UG code was written in C, with some work on existing Fortran.

I also helped with the introduction of a new RCS based source management system, and I learnt Lisp and did some X-windows work for emacs customisation.

I attended training courses on SQL and Relational Database Design, Object Oriented Design, Fagan Inspection, Technical Writing, Time Management, and product related courses.

[Shape's exact name changed several times when EDS bought the division of McDonnell Douglas that owned it. At the time I left it was "Shape Data, a division of EDS-Scicon Ltd.", later part of "EDS Unigraphics", then "UGS", and now part of Siemens.]

Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer

Cambridge Interactive Systems

I worked as part of the Database group on the Document Manager, Engineering Drawing Analysis, and in-house bug tracking applications, all using MDB (Medusa DataBase), a semi-relational database. Work included specification, design, coding, and the writing of the EDA User Manual (originally done as the base specification, but they were short of documenters at the time).

Most work was done in BaCIS, a high-level in-house language (an ancestor of Smallworld Magik), with some C and Fortran.

[CIS was part of Prime Computer UK when I left, after Prime bought Computervision who owned CIS.]

Experienced software engineer with a security slant.
Other social sites: https://armb.dreamwidth.org/291343.html

Taplio

Alan Braggins's Linkedin Analytics

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Alan Braggins's Linkedin Analytics

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Alan Braggins's Linkedin Analytics