Celebrating 50 Year Engineering Career

I am proud to have made it to my fiftieth year of engineering.? This year will be my 50th year as an IEEE member.??

Fifty years ago, September 1974, I entered engineering school at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, after graduating from Sydenham High School as Valedictorian, and winning the Julian Freeman Award, a Youth Science Foundation of Canada award, and a Queen's Tri-Colour Scholarship. ? I graduated with a B.Sc.? EE’78 with electronics, computers, and networks as an academic focus. Together with classmates Zoltan Szaplonczay and John Wemekamp we developed one of the first microprocessor-based telephone system for which we were honored to represent the University at a regional project contest.?For my penultimate summer I was fortunate to work under esteemed researcher David Drynan at BNR to develop a packet trunk test system. This project included development of hardware, micro-code and high level code that was a critical part of the transfer of data-packet technology to Nortel Manufacturing.

For thirteen years at Nortel/Bell-Northern Research (BNR), I worked my way up from junior engineer, in the Data Packet Networks (DPN) group, ?to Senior Director of a global technology group headed out of Ottawa, Canada.? In my first year at BNR (1978) I was assigned to the BERPEX project, as the sole engineer to commission the experimental SL-10 data packet-switching system in Berlin, Germany. The success of this work lead to me being assigned to commission the first data-packet (three node) network for La Banque de la Société Générale de Belgique (SGB) in Belgium in 1979.

While at BNR, I led research, development, and publication of network test systems including In-Service Off-Line Tester (ISOLT), Network Test Environment (NTE), Network Process Monitor (NPM), Interactive Protocol Tester (IPT), Network Load Test System (NLTS), Network Test System (NTS), Test and Traffic Simulator (TATS), Smart-Phone, Test Execution Administration Manager (TEAM) and Large-Scale Configuration (LSC) for digital networks, Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) and DMS switching family including Super-Node.

While at BNR I established research partnerships between BNR with esteemed collaborators Dr. Probert and Dr. Ural at University of Ottawa, and colleagues at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Bell-Communication Research (BellCore) International Standards Organization (ISO), Consultative Committee for International Telephony and Telegraphy (CCITT) and the Corporation for Open Systems (COS). Together with my teams at BNR, and collaborating collogues we contributed to international standards for network test automation, protocol conformance test automation methods, and advanced automated telecommunications testing tools for some of the world’s first successful X.25 packet networks, In-Service Digital Networks (ISDN), Signaling System 7 (SS7), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks, Ethernet-based Local Area Networks (LAN), Fiber-Optic transmission systems, and cellular wireless networks and handsets. Together we contributed to development of International standards for protocols, and the Tree and Tabular Combined Notation (TTCN).

?In 1992, I emigrated to California to be VP of Engineering at Tekelec, Calabasas, near Los Angeles, California. For four years I led development of a range of commercial network test, monitoring and conformance automation products including the Chameleon, SS7 PASM lines.

I lived and worked in the LA area in various engineering, business management and executive roles, As VP Engineering, at Telematics - ECI Telecom I led development of some of the first high performance communication internet remote access switching systems ACP and Nevada.

After obtaining my Executive MBA ’97 at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, I worked as General Manager of the Metrology Products Group, VIEW Engineering, where we developed and introduced the world’s first high performance linear motor-based optical metrology system called Pinnacle, industry record time, by employing total system simulation

As founding Senior Director of Engineering, Southern California group, I helped startup VPacket Communications build multi-protocol integrated voice/data access routers and an automated test environment.

Then I founded EdenTree Technologies, where we created and developed and patented a robotic product Connect-ET for network lab automation (and learned a lot about corrupt investors :-( ).

For 12 years, I worked in management and solution architect roles at Spirent Communications, PLC where I led a global team for release management, development of at test system called Test Harness of Test Harnesses (THOT), and DevOps for the company's array of high-end commercial test product based on Spirent Test Center (SPC).

In 2015 I contributed to the creation of The DevOps Institute, through collaboration of founders Jayne Groll, and Alan Shimel, by authoring several certification courses and foundational content. I continue to work with the DevOps Institute, MediaOps, and related companies DevOps, Security Boulevard CloudNativeNow, PeopleCert, TechstongTV, as well as global training partners as an author and accredited instructor.

From 2016, at Trace3, as the Principal DevOps Consultant, and DevOps partner lead I contributed to the creation of the DevOps consulting practices and tools, serving Trace3's enterprise clients and DevOps vendor partners with digital transformations for DevOps, DevSecOps and SRE practices

In 2019 I founded Engineering DevOps Consulting, which I operate today offering a range of executive consulting, training and author services for Continuous Quality, DevOps, DevSecOps and Site Reliability Engineering for global clients in the enterprise, government agencies, manufacturers and service provider industry sectors.

I have published widely including books, blogs, articles, webinars, white papers, eBooks and Center-of-Excellence guidance documents. For most of my career I have performed leadership roles overseeing research, development and management of systems, hardware and software products. ?These roles had me travel to many places in the world for business, management and industry interactions including international conferences and standards development. ???

Today I continue to engage with global clients in engineering and executive management as a senior consultant, certification instructor and author. ?I have been very fortunate over my 50-year career to have worked with some of the world’s leading people and companies for the areas that I focus on.? I am proud to have won many company and industry awards over the years including IEEE Outstanding Engineer for my work on test automation, networks and DevOps. At this stage in my career I am deeply engaged applying generative AI to Continuous Testing, DevOps, DevSecOps and SRE.

I currently have a very special interest in something I call "Continuous Security" for which I am publishing as a new approach to applying predictive and generative AI for next generation software security that combines the practices of development-centric DevSecOps, and production-centric SecOps, into a more wholistic set of integrated security practices.??

Together, with my new business partner Victorio, I currently have a goal to expand Continuous Quality, DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE service offerings to Mexico, and Latin countries.??

Who knows what the next 50 years will bring?? Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy applying my engineering aptitude, and continuous learning in the present, to help make a better tomorrow.