Paul Miniato

Architect, Systems Analyst, Designer, Team Lead

• Highly experienced, forward-thinking software and systems designer, known for robust, elegant and practical solutions to real-world problems.
• Management player, focused on strategic priorities, skilled in collaborative problem-solving with business leaders, IT professionals, clients and end-users.
• Insightful thinker, with extremely broad IT knowledge and a record of going deep into new technologies quickly; versatile, adaptable, and passionate about solving new problems; trained to think "outside the box" when required.
• Fully at home with agile prototyping and iterative development; accustomed to thinking "on the fly" and dealing with rapidly changing priorities.
• Sought after as a personable, energetic and high-integrity team player who works well with everyone; a natural mentor, trainer, coach, and leader; calm, diplomatic and always respectful.
• Results often exceed expectations in quality, thoroughness, elegance and relevance.

"One of the best computer professionals I know for understanding requirements of complex business applications as well as designing and building a system that meets these requirements. In spite of in-depth understanding of the system, he can describe the issues that need to be addressed in terms easily understood by non-technical individuals." - W.B., President & CEO

Case Study

1. Client: a rapidly growing Internet job board with a very active marketing department; the client had almost no development resources.
2. Challenge: the existing ASP system was overloaded, unstable, insecure, and hard to extend, yet the client was eager to expand into new verticals and regions, and to provide branded sites & feeds efficiently.
3. Solution Strategy: co-architected a Java/Linux/SQL solution, including zero-affinity application servers with LBC, separate SMP SQL Server, numerous MVC extensions to Apache JServ including Actions, ActionFactories, ListManagers, Java Object-Relational encapsulation & TransactionManager, XML data exchange, work-item Scheduler for balanced background processing. Co-led a team of 10 which successfully delivered Release One in the early 2000s.
4. Key Benefits: the client grew rapidly to become the largest hospitality job board in the world, then successfully attracted a corporate purchaser; as of Nov. 2007, the system supports 9 verticals & regions and 190 branded job sites with over 45K pageviews/day and continuous server uptimes of 90 to 300 days. The DB contains 1.5M users with 40K job agents, 120K jobs plus 2K/day. Our team easily converted from SQL Server to PostgreSQL, and after the client took operations in-house, theirs replaced JServ with JBoss. The same base architecture was reused to develop several other web applications.

"We appreciate the framework and architecture your team developed. It is a really powerful, reliable, extendable system. The framework is very good on the JBoss server. It's the best architecture in any of the job boards our parent corporation took over." - C.M., Chief Architect

"One of the top software developers I've encountered. He was instrumental in creating our web site and worked his magic on it consistently for six years. His integrity, professionalism, and team spirit are without question. " - D.C., Founder & CEO

Case Study

1. Employer: A software firm that was launching an on-line banking system on a network of PCs. The initial implementation on both client and server was divided into tools- and application- layers. The company grew from 20 to over 200 staff during my tenure.
2. Challenge: The existing application was single-threaded and the server halted on every error. Challenges included moving to 7x24 operations, upgrading from 286 to 8xSMP, from DOS to NT, from ISAM to SQL Server, from English to multilingual, while preserving the value of millions of lines of company and customer application code developed under the single-user paradigm.
3. Solution Strategy: Over several years, co-architected the evolution of the infrastructure. Key accomplishments included isolating SQL concurrency issues to a Transaction Manager, devising a strategy for single-user sandboxes within concurrent server, introducing Structured-Exception architecture to achieve target uptimes, and deploying Unicode for Japanese & Spanish.
4. Key Benefits: Achieved all of these improvements with almost no required changes of server application code. All deployments successfully evolved with new technologies, one winning the Best Windows App Award in the early 90s. Many systems continue to run the infrastructure. Company became a leader in the delivery of mid-sized banking systems in the Canadian, Latin American, and East Asian markets, and was recently acquired by a US firm.

Professional Experience

iCan Systems Inc., Abbotsford (2009 - present)

Our product and service is Smartsettle, an eNegotiation system that puts decision makers with conflicting objectives in control of a process that produces better outcomes in a shorter time.

Duties include assisting with R&D of Smartsettle Infinity focused on action research applications.

Talent Technology Corporation., Richmond (2008 - 2009)

• Researched & presented pros & cons of different approaches to evolve large legacy code base, and to resolve major infrastructure & performance issues.
• Designed new architecture that could be synchronized with the old, including a working C# .Net 3.5 domain model for highly-configurable business entities.
• Championed new coding standards and mentored developers and analysts.

iCan Systems Inc., Abbotsford (2007 - 2008)

• One-year contract to assist with product commercialisation.
• Helped design and supervise implementation of new product, Smartsettle One.
• Resolved usability and robustness issues with the Smartsettle Infinity product.
• Initiated and deployed issue-tracking systems to coordinate virtual offices.
• [+] more ...

"Paul came to us highly recommended and exceeded our expectations. He has a unique ability to make us all feel like we're working together in the same office even though we're actually working in different cities." - E.T., PhD, PEng., Founder & CEO

In-Touch Software Corporation, Richmond (1996 - 2006)

• Co-founder and Senior Designer/Developer for a consulting company of up to 12 staff, expert in OOD, Java, JDBC, J2EE, PostgreSQL, DRY, distributed architecture.
• Co-architect of the In-Touch Alliance Java/Linux/SQL architecture for high-performance transaction-based server software for high-volume secure applications.
• [+] more ...

Selected Clients:

• Hospitality Careers Online: (World's largest hospitality job board.) Engineered requirements, co-architected solution, co-led development and operations.
• Canadianretail.com: Successfully rescued a niche job-board under a very tight budget, enabling a profitable corporate merger.
• CUCBC: Requirements, design and prototype for web banking XML-based forms definition language and engine, enhancing programmer productivity.
• Fincentric Corporation: Optimized PROBE SQL Server interface, enabling increased sales.
• IDC Canada: Designed, developed and deployed version one of a virtual community centred on IT surveys.
• Certicom: Developed the specifications for CryptoMIME API, plus ECC vs. RSA benchmark.
• [+] more ...

"A very smart individual with a vast amount of experience in software development. He picked up XForms and XSLT from scratch and succeeded in coming to grips with a complex and challenging project. I highly recommend him for a senior architect/software engineer role." - K.W., PhD, Director, Product Development

Fincentric Corporation, Richmond, BC (1987 - 1996)

• One of the key architects of PROBE, still a key framework component of Fincentric's on-line full-function banking solution, deployed in hundreds of mid-sized financial institutions.
• As key development lead in the tools division, guided architecture and development smoothly through many technology evolutions.
• Managed PROBE product development for a team of up to 20 technologists, in a company of 200. Introduced practices such as Structured Peer Reviews. Improved interdepartmental relations.
• Acknowledged company-wide top expert in SQL & Transaction Managers, Networking & Communications, Gateway Architecture, Performance Measurement and Optimization, Failsafe Operations, Concurrent Architectures, Database Design and Programming, and Internationalization.
• Developed Fincentric's procedures for system capacity planning and response time modelling, and evaluated proposals and training for installation and upgrading of large customer networks.
• [+] more ...

For Further Information

• (more than 35 recommendations)

• Wide-ranging experience. [+] more ...

• Wide-ranging knowledge, interests, & passions [+] more ...

• Availability: SW Greater Vancouver [+] more ...

"As a grateful client whose enterprise would literally have not succeeded without Paul's talent and energy, I can't articulate a stronger endorsement for his work, skill, and innovation. He describes complex programming theories clearly and easily to neophytes. He has a retailer's devotion to customer service. And he is a genuinely good guy." - B.D., Founder & CEO

On the Internet at http://miniato.net/paul/resume/
PDF ^{(Portable Document Format)}
DOC ^{(for MS Word etc.)}
TXT ^{(plaintext)
Updated: February 2009}