Edward Welbourne's Career History

2002/April/3 onwards:

Software engineer for Opera Software ASA – working in various teams, helping keep core developers (implementing and refining support for open standards) and delivery teams (ensuring users get the best internet experience on any device) working in harmony. I've had technical responsibility for most of Opera's Unix (and GNU/Linux) code-base and am still heavilly implicated in its ongoing evolution: in particular, I'm the in-house expert on make-files and all things POSIX.

2000/March/27 to 2001/July/10:

Software engineer for Zeus technologies, developing the world's fastest and most webmaster-friendly web server. Working within a young and vibrant team, I

completed and maintained the infrastructure enabling the server to exploit specialist hardware to accelerate SSL's cryptography,
developed the infrastructure for content negotiation and for registration of websites with cryptographic certification authorities,
made installation work more robustly across the many Unixes,
wrote man pages and a test suite for ISAPI,
helped colleagues prepare training materials and
developed automatic test programs.

1996/July to 2000/March:

Software engineer at Laser-Scan (whose relevant parts have since become 1Spatial) in Cambridge, working on their object-oriented GIS kernel, Gothic. Aside from large amounts of time hunting down and fixing obscure bugs, I

designed and implemented an object-oriented query language unifying existing low-level query functionality,
consolidated and improved the in-house tool-set which supported Laser-Scan's ISO 9001 QA process

and my colleagues learned to consult me on a wide variety of technical issues.

1995/December to 1996/June:

Web site setup and management for Metro Internet Ltd. and system administration for User Interface Technologies, in Cambridge.

1994/November to 1995/May:

Development and evaluation, in conjunction with Oxford and Cambridge Compilers and the Fysisk Institutt, Universitet i Bergen, of The Shepherd, an evolutionary algorithm library. I was then the volunteer who managed a café for a few months while looking for more suitable employment. Concurrent with …

1994/November to 1995/November:

Consultancy follow-up contract, part time: enabled the Encyclopædia of Drosophila project to make use of my work for FlyBase, which it assimilated.

1993/November to 1994/October:

Coercion of data from a relational database (FlyBase) to an object-oriented database/display package (ACeDB) customised to the needs of geneticists. I achieved this by designing and implementing a language which packaged SQL queries with formatting directives in a general and robust manner. The project involved extensive collaboration with colleagues on either side of the Atlantic, in which the new medium of the web was a great help – running our server fell under my system management duties, which also embraced modest amounts of user support.

1991/February to 1993/October:

Mathematical and software research for NA Software. My work was directed towards the development of high-speed software to process images corrupted with a severe class of noise called coherent speckle. I had primary control of the research project to develop a program to segment such images (cut them into regions, each of which has constant visual texture – a concept whose formalisation lay at the heart of the entire project). I had overall editorial responsibility for regular progress reports for our customers on my work and that of four colleagues; this stretched from getting reports written, via typesetting to detailed proof-reading.

1988/October to 1991/January:

Solid modelling for Shape Data of Cambridge. Work spanned all phases, from design through coding and testing to user documentation, of modifications to the mathematical modelling core of a fully three-dimensional CAD (Computer Aided Design) system. My work extended to the training of recruits and trouble-shooting work on a suite of in-house software tools customised to the needs of the development and maintenance teams.

1985/Summer:

Prototyping work on a user interface for FEGS Ltd of Cambridge, under the sagacious guidance of Malcolm Sabin.

1982/January to June and 1983/Summer:

Computer programming and mathematical support for a team of engineers working for Britain's National Nuclear Corporation, testing the design of safety systems for nuclear power plant (Sizewell B). This mostly revolved around the modelling of mixed-phase flows in boiling water.

Written by Eddy.
This page is part of my curriculum vitae.