David Gilbert

404 Meadow St.

Oshawa

+1(416)356-3747

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1990 - 1995

University of Guelph. Bachelor of Science (Honours Co-op). Double Major in Maths and Computer Science

August 2003 to Present

DaveG.ca, 404 Meadow St., Oshawa.  As an independent contractor, I have been managing systems for two companies on long term contract, building new servers and designing new system software for FreeBSD.  Recent short term contracts include a system migration from one ISP to another and a rescue of a complete system from the only remaining partial backup.

December 2002 to July 2003

Wiznet Inc, 210 Dundas St. W., Toronto.  As the Systems Manager for Wiznet, I successfully merged the systems of the four companies to achieve substantial cost savings in information systems maintenance and bandwidth purchasing.  I managed the day-to-day technical issues at Wiznet.  In May 2003 I implemented IPv6 over top of the existing IPv4 network.

My involvement with Wiznet ended with a hostile takeover of my position.

January 1997 to November 2002

Velocet Communications, 210 Dundas St. W., Toronto.  Together with two partners from Canscape, we founded Velocet Communications.  As President, I managed the day-to-day operations of the company, met with prospective clients and performed other roles related to marketing.

Velocet was an internet based company, for which I managed the computer systems.  I chose  and acquired or built the software that ran on the servers.  Building and managing systems without downtime was my specialty at Velocet.

I was also responsible for several areas of new software development.  I performed the general estimation of new software projects and assigned them to our developers.  My own software development, when time permits, included cryptography, internet firewalls, and log analysis software.

Velocet spawned DSL.ca in October 2000 to mass-market broadband internet access for home and business customers.  I designed and implemented all network, billing and customer service information systems.

Velocet spawned Datavaults.ca in July 2001.  Datavaults is a premium colocation center featuring multiple redundancies in power, internet, security and environment.  Datavaults featured private suites for colocation of servers.  I designed the colocation center and designed, implemented and operated its information systems.

Velocet, DSL.ca and Datavaults.ca merged with Wiznet Inc. in November 2002.

August 1996 to December 1996

Canscape, Inc., 2820 Fourteenth Avenue, Markham. As the Systems Manager for Canscape, I managed a department of up to 10 people running a heterogenious network of systems to provide internet service, web hosting and custom applications for a broad spectrum of clients. I was hired by Canscape nearly a week after the previous systems manager had left with no notice. 

I recovered all the company's systems from the shambles that they were in, organized a panic move of equipment from one location to another, and maintained and improved the systems to provide excellent service to Canscape's clients. 

Canscape sales staff interacted directly with me to obtain quotes and estimations of technical cost and availability. In this role I often interacted directly with the client either in meetings as the primary technical contact for Canscape or on the phone to obtain more direct information than the sales people were able to provide. 

At Canscape, I worked daily with the web and the internet. I used Perl, C and Bourne shell to work with web content and to perform system and network administration. I implemented a complex system and network monitoring tool using software from the internet. I constantly used the internet as a resource to enhance my efficiency and services to Canscape.

May 1996 to July 1996

ISG Technologies, Inc., 6509 Airport Road, Mississauga. As the toolsmith I managed software tools across a large number of platforms supporting roughly 120 software developers. I was responsible for evaluating new tools from the internet and from commercial vendors. 

While at ISG, I ported many software development tools from the internet to the various platforms that were required. They included Solaris (2.4 and 2.5), SunOS, IRIX, AIX, OSF/1 (now Digital UNIX), VMS and NT. To do this, I used my knowledge of the languages and Operating Systems involved to build, validate and repair software. I worked with C, C++, Perl, imake, sed, awk, FORTRAN and many other less common languages to make the software work across all ISG's platforms. The greatest challenge to this task was to create a build and versioning environment that would allow us to guarantee that we could reproduce an environment precisely enough to reproduce a specific binary. 

The toolsmith position at ISG was part of the System Support group. When work overflowed from other support group members, I pitched in to help with system administration, advice concerning OS quirks, and fixing the occasional emergency.

May 1993 to May 1996

PCI Inc., 50 West Wilmot, Richmond Hill. As a software developer and toolsmith, I was responsible for the toolset that other developers used along with my own development projects. I helped PCI connect to the internet, and performed many system administration and internet related tasks as required. 

My career at PCI started as a co-op student from the University of Guelph. During co-op semesters, I worked full time for PCI. During my study semesters, I often completed extra contract work for PCI to earn extra money for school. 

My development at PCI was primarily in C and C++, but included FORTRAN, lisp and perl when necessary. PCI supports many architectures including most popular UNIX vendors, VMS, OS/2 and Windows. Since all software developed at PCI must run on all platforms, I learned how to write quality software that is very portable at PCI. I was responsible for several major areas of PCI's software including: 

• Tape Support: I coded low level tape support for PCI in my first co-op semester. Tape support involves a delicate balance between features and operating systems. Many desirable operations are not provided by various operating systems must be either emulated or flagged as unavailable. My tape support code included support for tapes over the network and emulation of tapes with disk files. 

• Tablet Support: I coded low level tablet drivers for PCI also in my first co-op term. Once the drivers were finished, I wrote a number of panels to work with one of PCI's GUI applications to use the tablet device to correct satellite image coordinates to map coordinates. 

• File Formats: I wrote several file format support modules for PCI including JPEG, GIF, ADRG, and PPM. Some file formats come with ample documentation and are simply a matter of creating routines to perform a conversion. For other formats, I had to reverse engineer the file format to produce a working module. 

• X-Windows: While at PCI, I extended several large software packages with more functionality coupled to new X-Window panels. 

• Consulting: On several occasions, I was sent on behalf of PCI to aid other companies using our software libraries. This included training developers, helping them with bugs, and customizing PCI's libraries such that they were useful to other companies.

January 1993 to May 1993

Environment Canada, 4905 Dufferin St., Toronto. As one of the last tasks of the RSERP project, I wrote and integrated several gridding algorithms.

May 1992 to September 1992

Environment Canada, Administration Building, Pearson International Airport, Mississauga. Working closely with weather forecasters in a production environment, I created some small graphical applications to aid in their environment.

September 1991 to December 1991

Environment Canada, 4905 Dufferin St, Toronto. In the early stages of the RSERP project, my co-op term consisted of fixing various small bugs assigned to me.