About me.

So who am I? I’m an IT guy in love with all things technology. I enjoy trying out new languages, working with new web services (most recently Google’s ‘fusion tables’ and the Google Maps API) and recovering from the pitfalls of installing pre-alpha or beta apps on my mobile-phone/iPad/laptop/work-station. Besides my day-work (here), my current PP (pet-projects) are 1) helping the new dev of LausanneNatation create his first PHP web-app, 2) installing a Linux cluster on my home computer(s), and 3) creating an iPhone beta for managing hotel-registrations.

I’m not that great at writing a short bio that makes me sound awesome. But here goes:

Do-it-your-selfer, if-it-can’t-be-done-give-it-to-him, trouble-’sharpshooter’, speaker and teacher, Shawn’s IT passion has been going strong for over 20 years. A PhD in networks and protocols and a patent for online-monitoring and testing belies his down-and-dirty love for both “hands-on solve-it” system-problems & resolving newfangled network nitpicks. Difficult to pigeon-hole, his skills squarely place him on a Venn-diagram in the unlikely intersection of system administration, development and databases. He’s been mentioned twice on prime-time television (French,.. then Swiss), published many articles, and worked with such diverse professionals as surgeons, bankers, and paleo-climatalogists.

To check out more of the work I’ve been doing with my current employer, read the texts on the ARVE website.
Or download some of these PDFs : cv.pdf, certificates.pdf, references.pdf

A Little History

After finishing my undergraduate (Mathematics & Computer-Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada) in 1991, I came to Switzerland and started working (as Unix/Sun system-manager, research-assistant, software developer) with networks and communication-protocols at the EPFL (LIT Group: Industrial Computing Laboratory of the Computer Science Department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology).

While taking care of their network and Unix-workstations I also ended up defending my PhD dissertation dealing with mathematical models for reasoning about delays in communication networks (‘Formal Models for Synchronous Time-Critical Control Systems’).

From there, I became the system-administrator (and 1st Assistant in charge of 2 PhD wannabee’s plus dozens of student-projects) in the EPFL-TCOM group in the Electrical Engineering Department; In that context I had the joy of teaching first-year students all about TCP/IP, routing, and security (“Introduction to Computer Networks & Protocols”). Our lab ultimately became the Institute for Computer Communications and Applications (ICA) where I was made team leader in two European research projects dealing with high-speed/high-security communication (TRUMPET) and validation-methods in distributed platforms (Ernestina).

I moved into out of academia and into ‘industry’ in order to innovate solutions on the intranet of a top swiss mail-order firm (Charles Veillon) and resolve database management problems (Oracle). When they outsourced their IT dept. I changed companies to work at Networkers in developing their Java-based e-Government application (and database) for managing Swiss civilian and military ‘drivers licenses’; My system-admin skills were put to use installing their first version-control system (SVN) and training their developers in its use. When they downsized I became the system-admin and webmaster (10k visits/day on our HUG-hosted Universitz-medical servers) for a Geneva-based SME tightly coupled to the World Health Organisation (WHO); Besides resolving their technical problems and teaching IT to foreign-nationals, I successfully marketed the PHP-based medical-data-management application I developed to the point where it was used in 7 countries (and >80k patients) including the European robotic laparoscopy group EGRU. In a restructuring-move I was given the title of ‘Director of Informatics’ where I continued managing the IT projects of the small group, resolve their IT problems, develop new web-applications, manage the IT budget and client-billing, and evaluate new technology solutions. In this position, I also delivered an international multi-language e-Learning web-app, to the WHO, which had originally only been a learning-project to better evaluate Ruby open-source web framework Rails.

When the foundation downsized (to a single person) I become an independent consultant providing user-support to the WHO on the e-learning app they were still using. I also developed my first iPhone app (in order to learn the technology) for UNIA. I finally started to work with climatologists in the Environmental-Sciences at the EPFL (they study how the weather has evolved over the last million years). As their sys-admin, I’ve been developing SQL databases (writing pg/PSQL functions) and performing statistical analysis (with R) in order to reparametrize their Fortran-based weather model. We’re on the edge of using my new-found skills in MPI (intensive-course August 2011) to redo the Fortran code of other models used at the lab. We’ve also built dozens of queries to deal with the historical population database used to study how human presence evolved in Europe. I’ve built them a Google-maps interface to weather-station climate-data with a backend of Unix shell scripts grafted to Google’s Fusion-table beta. Did I mention that you can read more on their website ?

When I’m not working with technology, I work as a freelance photographer skilled in both “Location Portraits” (for corporate head-shots) and “Silverware” (for Auction-house style shots) and I manage my own independent business, ‘TangoLausanne’.

Media mentions

TSR (Television Suisse Romande), 2010: RenteCalc iPhone app
TF1 (National French Television), 1995: ‘Il n’y a pas de problème’
BILD (National German Magazine), 1994: Technology and culture