Michael Burke …but please call me Beau. View Michael Burke's LinkedIn profile

In a nutshell.

Solving problems is at the core of my identity. Given that, I tend to do so tenaciously. I have a long history of self-motivation, establishing clear goals for myself and achieving those goals. In large part, I'm successful because I value close, honest relationships with talented peers and mentors.

I'm looking for a position in an organization with a strong, team-oriented culture. I want to use my well-tested software engineering skills to solve challenging and interesting problems. I want to create stable, secure and scalable web applications that make a real impact in the lives of their users.

References and code samples happily provided, upon request.

Core competencies.

Operating Systems
Mac OS X 10.2 through 10.8, Linux (primarily Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu), and Windows XP through 7.
Languages
JavaScript, C, PHP, REALbasic, SQL and Java.
Web Technologies
HTML/CSS, JSON, jQuery, bootstrap.js, prototype.js, Solr, Apache, MySQL, and HTTP.
Tools
git, subversion, emacs, X11, gcc, make, Adobe CS, and JIRA.

Professional experience.

  • North Plains Systems formerly Xinet, Inc.

    (Junior Software Engineer) to

    My primary responsibility at North Plains is developing and maintaining the web-facing side of the Xinet digital asset management (DAM) suite. In its current form, the suite is composed of a 4-deep stack of technologies. At the top is an HTML/CSS/JavaScript front-end served by a PHP templating engine. The templating engine communicates with a JSON-emitting web API written in C. The API pulls data from three sources: assets on the filesystem, a MySQL database of meta-data, and a Solr index of both. I have contributed secure, stable and efficient code to each layer of the stack.

    Xinet is used on nearly every continent, necessitating a great deal of internationalization work. I have helped transition filename and meta-data values from numerous legacy character encodings (Shift-JIS, ISO-Latin1, EUC-KR, and others) to Unicode. That work included a modified implementation of the Unicode Collation Algorithm, written in C.

    I have used JavaScript, along with the canvas tag and lots of CSS positioning, to write a browser-based annotation widget. It allows users to non-destructively mark up assets in any modern web browser, including IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

    From scratch, I developed a desktop application used to transfer files via HTTP to the Xinet server. The application was written in REALbasic (now called Xojo) and has several intriguing features. Among them are a JSON parser, AppleSingle encoder, and application icon editor.

    Recently, I have spent a good deal of time overhauling the front-end with bootstrap.js and jQuery. Both libraries have simplified the addition of a drag-and-drop browser-based file upload interface to the front end. Additionally, I have used them to streamline tool selection for the above mentioned annotation widget.

    In order to facilitate a move towards continuous integration, I've researched JavaScript unit testing frameworks. I chose js-test-driver because it's well-supported and runs tests on a wide range of platforms. I'm working to extend test coverage to all Xinet front-end JavaScript.

    In addition to writing software, I spend my time interacting with our Q.A. department, resellers, and customers. I have designed, written and led multi-day developer training sessions. I have written extensive documentation of our front end systems, intended for our developer partners. I communicate with Q.A. daily, working with them to resolve customer issues quickly and satisfactorily.

    North Plains Systems purchased Xinet, Inc. in April of 2012.

  • Clementine Northwest. Defunct

    Senior Developer and Webmaster from to

    Using the Zen Cart open source e-commerce platform as a foundation, I designed and developed the Clementine NW website. One design goal was to support an affiliate-based sales model. Zen Cart did not have that feature, so I created an open source plug-in called Snap Affiliates from scratch. Snap Affiliates continues to be used and supported by the Zen Cart community.

  • Conix Research.

    Web Designer and Intern Software Developer from to

    I was hired at Conix Research to design and build web projects. In my time there, I completed two sites. One was the company's primary web presence, which I wrote copy for, designed and implemented. The other was a vision health evaluation and information site.

    In addition to the layout, code and copy, I also wrote a number of Java applets for the vision health project. Among them were a color blindness test, a test of visual acuity, and several interactive optical illusions. The visual health test applets passed results to a small server process, which I wrote in C++ using the standard C socket library. In a first for the company, I had the server store information in a MySQL database, rather than in flat files.

Education.