Paul Parks

What Makes Me Unique

• Over 34 years of professional software-development experience covering a broad range of languages, platforms, libraries, technologies, and application domains.
• Experience leading multi-cultural teams, working across countries, cultures, and time zones.
• An eye for continuous improvement of technologies and processes.
• A talent for explaining technical matters to a non-technical audience.
• A lifelong learner who is continuously exploring and experimenting with new technologies, new approaches, and new experiences.

Core Skills

Leadership: Mentorship and management of diverse teams.
Communication: Excellent writing skills, which I constantly practice in my professional life as well as on my personal blog.
Global Perspective: Experience working with, and communicating successfully with, colleagues and customers across various countries, cultures, and time zones.
Customer Interaction: Engagement with clients for tailored services and satisfaction during solution delivery and support. Skilled at translating complex technical matters for non-technical audiences (and vice-versa).
Software Delivery: Delivery of mission-critical software to substantial clients; adherence to quality and schedule.
Full Life-Cycle Management: Proficiency in software project management from inception to support, with classic project management, Kanban/Lean, Scrum.
Multi-faceted Development: Various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix), application domains (desktop, server, command-line, web) and languages (C#, C++, C, JavaScript, TypeScript, etc.).

Technical Skills

Software Domains: Web sites and applications, Web APIs (REST, SOAP), Graphical desktop applications (GUI), Self-service kiosks, Point-of-sale (POS) systems, Server applications and services, Command-line utilities (CLI), Native libraries and APIs
Development Platforms: Windows (desktop/workstation from 3.0 through Windows 11), Windows Server (2003, 2008), Windows Embedded (POSReady 2009, Windows CE 6.0), Unix (System V Release 4, Sun), Linux (various distributions from early Slackware to current day), DOS (IBM, MS)
Programming Languages: C++ (through C++20), C (ANSI C ‘89), C# (1 through 11), Assembly (6502, 8086, x86, custom), JavaScript, TypeScript, shell (PowerShell, csh, ksh, bash, DOS), Java, LISP, COBOL, Software AG Natural, Basic (Quick Basic, Microsoft Professional Basic, Visual Basic, VB.NET, and my own variant ClifferBasic), Bytecode interpreters
Frameworks & Technologies: .NET 8, .NET 7, Angular, Microsoft Azure, Docker, Entity Framework, Microsoft SQL Server, .NET Razor Pages, ASP.NET, XAML, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), .NET Windows Forms (WinForms), .NET/Windows Interop, .NET Framework (1 through 4.7), HTML (through HTML5), HTTP (1.0, 1,1), XML, CSS, ASP, WordPress, REST, SOAP, XSLT, WAP, XML-RPC, Java Servlet Pages (JSP), ESXi, VMWare Workstation, Active Template Library (ATL), Network Sockets, Common Object Model (COM), MFC, Windows API (Windows 3.0 through Win32)

Citizenship and Visa Status

• United States citizen by birth
• Singapore Permanent Resident visa status since March 2022
• Currently reside in Singapore (since October 2017)

Professional Experience

Freelance Software Developer

Parks Computing Services

• Custom software development and consulting. Current project is as a senior software developer for Agile Bridge, providing support and development services for Korean and Japanese users of the Abacus product, which is a web-based micro-service calculation engine used for financial computations in the automotive industry. Technical stack is .NET and C# back end with Entity Framework and Razor Pages, with an Angular front end.

Corporate Director & Program Manager

Sentience Solutions Pte. Ltd.

• Oversee FinTech projects for the banking industry. Current project is managing a program to provide a web portal and web services giving access to banking and remittance services for overseas nationals of a sub-Saharan African nation.

Digital Marketing, Web Design, & IT Management

Padma Jairam – Counselling Psychologist

• Design and maintain web site and web content for Padma Jairam - Counselling Psychologist, a psychotherapy practice that began serving clients in June 2021 (https://padmajairam.com). Work with owner to define digital marketing strategy, then execute that strategy to build and maintain client base. Achieved a full schedule of clients by the first week of June 2021.
• Set up and manage IT resources for the business, including Microsoft 365, cloud tools such as OneDrive and SharePoint, and client relationship management tools (CRM).

Senior Manager

Diebold-Nixdorf

• Led a team of retail business analysts based in various cities across the Asia-Pacific region. The business analysts are engaged with Diebold-Nixdorf customers across the APAC region in multiple retail projects for point-of-sale, self-service checkout, and loyalty solutions in the grocery, fuel & convenience, health & beauty, and fashion retail sectors.
• Led a team of software engineers based in Singapore developing and maintaining Diebold-Nixdorf's TP.Linux retail point-of-sale application.
• Active participant in the APAC Retail Professional Services management team, reporting to the director of APAC Retail Professional Services.

Technical Consulting Senior Manager

NCR Corporation

• Consulted on multiple retail projects across the Southeast Asia sub-region from pre-sales through delivery.
• Liaised between NCR’s software engineering teams and in-region professional-services teams working directly with the customer to ensure that customer solutions were delivered accurately and in a timely manner.
• Worked directly with customers in the APAC region to identify and resolve issues.

Senior Software Engineer

NCR Corporation

• Led local and offshore development teams in the design, development, testing, and delivery of self-checkout and self-service kiosk software for the retail and postal industries, including NCR’s largest retail account and for a national post office service.
• Worked directly with customers to gather, understand, and clarify requirements.
• Created estimates and project plans for software development projects.
• Provided mentoring and consultation to development teams.

Software Technical Lead

SYSGENS, Inc.

• Led local and offshore development teams in the development of point-of-sale, self-checkout, and self-service kiosk software.
• Worked with NCR Professional Services to gather, understand, and clarify customer requirements.
• Created estimates and project plans for software development projects.
• Architected and designed solutions to meet requirements for NCR customers.
• Designed, developed, maintained, and provided training for key software components and APIs.
• Led integration project for a self-service kiosk for the British post office, Post Office Ltd. Developed an innovative integration of NCR's self-service checkout application with a new, back-end integration to a SOAP web service rather than a point-of-sale system. The kiosk helped Post Office meet savings targets, and it provided a new platform for self-service offerings not found in other integrations of NCR''s self-service checkout.
• Led design and development of a new user interface subsystem, known as Apex, for NCR Advanced Checkout Solution (ACS) to extend my previous work with the UI. The new UI added support for touch devices, hybrid touch/DynaKey devices, and full keyboard devices, while also providing multi-language support.
• Designed, developed, and maintained the integration subsystem between NCR's self-service checkout and ACS, known as ACSIO.
• Designed, developed, and maintained a high-performance, high-reliability, configurable logging and tracing subsystem for use in ACS, ACSIO, Apex, and self-service checkout. Developed native language libraries for integrating the subsystem into C, C++, .NET, and JavaScript applications.
• Architected a new integration subsystem between NCR's self-service checkout and ACSIR, using Apex, allowing integration logic to be developed in JavaScript rather than in C++.

Application Developer

Vorsite Corporation

• Developed intranet web applications and native utilities for Microsoft, a Vorsite contract customer and partner.
• Developed client-side browser controls targeting HTML 4 and DOM 2 browsers, for both ASP and ASP.NET applications.

Senior Design Engineer

Intava, Inc.

• Designed and implemented server products for the wireless Internet industry.
• Implemented XML-RPC specification in Java to support integration of Java server code with multiple web servers via an RPC interface.

President

Parks Computing Services, Inc.

• Created web host pages for Java applet-based system, Witness Systems' eQuality Release 6. Developed a Java servlet system to separate complex JavaScript validation logic from presentation markup, as well as to ease cross-browser web page development, via server-side processing of XHTML web pages containing custom design tags residing in a separate XML namespace.
• Created Java servlet to generate report data selection forms for browser-based application, using XSL stylesheets to format output of XML data. Output of the report form was sent to Actuate reporting engine.

Software Engineer

SYSGENS, Inc.

• Developed software for NCR Advanced Checkout Solution (ACS), a point-of-sale application.

Developer I

PC DOCS, Inc.

• Performed analysis and implementation of software designs for PC DOCS version 4.2 and 4.3.
• Served as technical liaison to customer-support department and provided on-site technical support.

Computer Programmer Analyst

Executive Office of the Governor

• Performed programming and analysis duties for Legislative Appropriations System/Planning and Budgeting Subsystem (LAS/PBS), wrote applications in MVS/ESA environment in Natural 2.1 with ADABAS database, maintained existing COBOL applications, and wrote and maintained related JCL.
• Worked in the Personal Computer Support unit developing and maintaining PC-to-mainframe data transfer utilities in Microsoft Professional BASIC to create Lotus spreadsheets from mainframe-resident state budget data.
• Developed a character-based, windowed user interface for use in transfer utilities.
• Wrote related Windows applications with Microsoft Visual Basic 1.0 and Borland C 3.0.
• Maintained office PCs, and installed and evaluated PC software. Performed limited administration duties on a 25-node Microsoft LAN Manager network.

A Selection of Personal Projects

Xfer Language

Xfer is an experimental data-serialization language that is designed to be a more flexible and more strictly typed alternative to JSON. The GitHub repository contains a basic specification for the language along with a parser, an object model, and a serialization/deserialization utility.

Clic

Clic began as a sample program to demonstrate and test the REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) capabilities of the Cliffer CLI library. It is now a separate project that implements a stack-based calculator. The application stores the stack and variables across multiple invocations, making it suitable for scripting as well as interactive usage. Clic is implemented in .NET 8.0 and runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

ClifferBasic

Like Clic, ClifferBasic also began as a sample program for Cliffer. It is now a separate project that implements a BASIC programming environment as a command-line application, in the style of classic home computers like the Commodore 64 and the Apple ][. It is capable of editing, storing, loading, and executing BASIC programs, and it can execute BASIC commands interactively. ClifferBasic is implemented in .NET 8.0 and runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Cliffer CLI Library

Cliffer is a .NET library built on top of Microsoft's System.CommandLine library that makes command-line interface (CLI) applications much easier to write. It uses attributed programming so that developers can add attribute declarations to their code, and the Cliffer library takes care of all the boilerplate necessary for creating complete, professional-quality CLI applications.

Parkscomputing.com

My personal/freelancing web site was previously hosted on WordPress, but this was not sufficient for my needs and interests. I wanted to be able to edit raw HTML and try various web technologies on individual pages, which was difficult to do with WordPress. I wrote my own web site engine with ASP.NET Razor Pages on .NET 7. The site is hosted on Azure Web Services as a containerized application (Docker). I am currently adding the ability for readers to leave comments on pages. This feature is implemented as a RESTful web service hosted on Azure (containerized), with the comments stored in an Azure SQL Server database. I am extending the site engine to retrieve and display comments as well as accept new comments, and I am making a separate application to notify me of new comments so that I can approve or reject them.

Maize Virtual CPU

This project implements a 64-bit virtual CPU called "Maize". See the file README.md for more details on the Maize CPU assembly language and the simple operating system that runs on it.

The near-term goal is to implement a set of devices to bridge from the virtual CPU environment to the host machine, create a "BIOS" layer above the virtual devices, implement a simple OS and a subset of Unix/Linux system calls (interrupt $80), and finally port a C/C++ compiler (likely Clang or GCC) that will generate Maize machine code.

Set-Associative Cache in C#

A C# implementation of a set-associative cache with multiple cache-replacement policies, such as least-frequently used, least-recently used, or most-recently used.

Conway's Game of Life in JavaScript

An example of how to write high-performance JavaScript code using the HTML canvas element to implement Conway's Game of Life, which is demonstration of cellular automata simulating living organisms.

Dragsens, a Console-based Drag Sensitivity Utility

A simple utility that allows users to change the number of pixels the mouse has to travel before a drag operation is initiated. Used by private users and by systems administrators to prevent accidental drag-and-drop operations.

EAN-13 Barcode Generator in JavaScript

A web page that accepts HTTP GET parameters on the URL line and outputs an EAN-13 barcode generated via JavaScript and HTML DOM.

Pbrain Language Interpreter and Compiler

The pbrain programming language is an extension I made to the Brainf**k programming language that adds the ability to define and call procedures. The site linked above has an interpreter implemented in C++ and a .NET compiler implemented in C#.