Afan Ottenheimer, Software and Database Architect

Developer with 12 years of experience managing challenging and fast-paced projects for large enterprise and mid-tier companies. Outstanding project planning, execution, monitoring and resource balancing skills with ability to take the reins of complex technology problems and deliver elegant solutions. Seasoned professional educator, effective at training, motivating and mentoring managers, engineers, developers and technical staff. Excel at communicating with stakeholders to provide highly accurate reports and status regarding ongoing projects and initiatives.

• 2004 Project Manager and Development Team Lead for a person-to-person campaign management strategy with functionality beyond current commercial and open-source solutions. Granted funding only two weeks before deadline to start campaign yet kept an intense development schedule to create a complete system from scratch capable of supporting hundreds of concurrent users for multiple political campaigns with their campaign managers, all accessing over 2.5 million voter-records. Managed cross-functional team of stakeholders, designers, Q/A, programmers and database administrators to ensure the 3-tier web-application was delivered on time and within budget. Client gave credit to the software for the unprecedented success of nearly all participating campaigns. Also assisted with patent applications and commercialization
  strategies.

• 2005: Consultant - Lead Developer for a mid-size enterprise tape-free backup system. Designed and built a system from scratch and deployed successfully. Analyzed and documented customer data flows and designed significant improvements based on real-world needs. Authored presentations on the ROI of the new system. Performed in-depth analysis of ext2 vs reiserfs filesystems. Utilized data compression, binary differentials, and secure digests. The system has been running for two years trouble-free even with nightly backups handling seven 100+ Gig systems over multiple T1s. Also built a daily notification/monitoring system with success/failure alerts.

• 2000: Provided emergency project management support for IBM Midrange systems connected via a WAN. Requested to serve as an emergency solution provider when numerous other consultants had failed to deliver after several months. Provided client hardware consulting services (CSU/DSUs), installation support, contracting support (System/36 specialists) and as a project manager with communication between USWEST, IBM support, CSU/DSU hardware support and client. Able to resolve the problems preventing integration and come to a complete solution in less than 7 days, far under budget, and in time for the client's Grand Opening.

• 1998: Lead DBA, Programmer, and Project Manager for a multi-hospital, web-based patient study. Highly complex project designed to handle all patient forms (including X-ray data) on emerging web-database technology. Program integrated patient records from 6 Hospitals in real-time in order to generate enough data for meaningful statistics. Managed a team of programmers and trained them on relevent technologies. Performed seamless upgrades from PHP2 to PHP3 to PHP4, and from mSQL to MySQL3 to MySQL4 to MySQL5, as well as numerous Linux OS upgrades, all without down-time to the customer.

  Although an IT staff member walked out of the initial meeting saying the project “couldn’t be done”, managed to persuade key decision makers and worked with them to setup deliverables and timeline. Successfully delivered project under budget and ahead of schedule. In order to create real-time charting in image format, created from scratch and released one of the first web-based graphing libraries in PHP (phplot). Clients were so satisfied they used their first year experience in order to win a 5-year, multi-million dollar grant for expanding the project.

• 1998 Wrote and released PHPLOT to the public. Recognized as the 6th most successful download on sourceforge in 2000. PHPLOT has been incorporated into other open source and commercial applications, such as Snort, used by millions of people and thousands of companies.
  

• Masters with Thesis (Computational Analysis of Dust in Plasmas), Theoretical Plasma Physics, University of Iowa, 1995
• Passed PhD Comprehensive Exam, University of Iowa, 1994
• B.A. Physics / High Honors and Thesis (Pulsar DMs using Millisecond Dual-frequency Oberservations at Arecibo Radio Telescope), Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, 1992

"Afan is one of the most intelligent and honest people I know. He is always learning and pushing the edge of technology and business models. He is an incredibly hard worker, and is a great father as well. He lives and breaths database technology, security technology, and the Internet. I depend on Afan for all of my Internet related questions and issues." - Mike Bennett (January 6, 2005)

"Afan has not only a great technical mind, but he balances the techological with a strong business acumen. His ongoing contribution to my business is incalculable" Mike Karr (February 24, 2005)

"Afan is a very creative and energetic problem solver. He identifies high-value ideas that are focused and practical and he is able to quickly deliver solutions. He's a great asset to any dynamic, fast-growing organization. He's intelligent, wonderfully warm in spirit, & honest. He is a well-respected instructor, always willing to share his energy and ideas." Davi Ottenheimer (January 3, 2005)