Todd West twest@agora.rdrop.com

 

 

Objective

 

Stay where I am.  :-)

 

Experience

 

SDET2, Identity Framework   Microsoft, March 2004–present.  Redmond, Washington.
Test technical lead for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) message security and federated identity, including servicing, fuzzing and stress tooling, and mentoring.  Responsible for end to end usability and security, architectural oversight of product and test code, test coverage audits.  Owner of  WCF federation support, most visibly used by Windows CardSpace, and various other message security features.  Passionate about customer connection and MSDN documentation, reviewer of WCF security guidance.  Good job, not looking to go anywhere anytime soon.

 

RA, RF Design for System on Chip ASICs  University of Washington, January 2002 to March 2004.  Seattle, Washington.
Lead for frequency domain component of DARPA’s CoSMoS project for simulation of analog circuits in conjunction with electromagnetic fields.  Primary applications RF systems on chip, packaging, statistical modeling of wireless communication channels.  Specialization in high performance, object oriented, implementations of field solver and fast multipole method components.  Responsible for software architecture, modularity, extensibility, user and programmer interfaces, and optimization.  OO codebase achieved same memory compactness and speed of special purpose C codes and was more than an order of magnitude faster than comparable Fortran implementations.  Developed cutting edge, physics driven, fast frequency sweep methods and spherical interpolation corrections.  Implemented OO frequency domain Spice, including MOS device and RF component models.

 

Principal Engineer, Large Probe Cards  FormFactor, August 2000 to May 2001.  Livermore, California.
Leading advocate of formalized software design. Worked closely with FormFactor's CAD programming group, establishing data formats, setting code architectures, selecting algorithms, and transforming prototype tools into production code. Developed most design methodologies and prototype design automation for 128+ die probe cards, including floorplanning, autorouting, resistance heuristics, signal timing control, netlisting, design verification, and database integrity checks. Encouraged the definition of a hierarchical design parameter file format so design rules could be changed without recoding. Coordinated development and verification of tester data objects concurrent with tester interface development for the Advantest T5375P (LM4), Agilent V4400 (Palisades), and other high parallelism testers. Directly responsible for the data structures behind designs comprising around $8 million in revenue and $1 million of capital and NRE in fiscal year 2001.

 

Hardware Engineer, Universal Serial Bus (USB)  Intel Architecture Labs, June 1997 to August 2000.   Hillsboro, Oregon.
Responsible for USB Implementors [sic] Forum's (USB-IF) industry-wide electrical compliance enabling program.  Wrote Intel's USB 2.0 electrical test plan, parts of the USB 2.0 specification, and did much of the initial 480Mbit/s low-level protocol design.  Developed powerful, automated design verification tools to measure USB electrical performance and implemented most electrical requirements for the USB-IF's USB logoing program. Worked around multiple oscilloscope API bugs to create a data capture engine for TDS scopes.  Used the combined software stack to resolve major USB problems for Intel, HP, IBM, LSI, etc., including showstopper issues with the Intel 810 chipset launch and design errors in the Playstation 2 USB core.

 

 

Skills

 

Security  Threat and attack vector modeling, attack surface measurement, fuzzing, penetration and other black and white hat testing.  WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-Federation, WS-SecureConversation, WS-SecurityPolicy.  STRIDE.  SAML 1.1 and 2.0, spnego/negotiate/Windows authentication, X509 certificates, Kerberos, NTLM, SSL/tlsnego.  Claims based authorization, impersonation, and delegation.

 

Code Architecture and Design  Object oriented software architecture, implementation, and maintenance.  Beta and production releases.  Bug avoidance through flexible simplicity, hierarchy, reuse, spike solutions.  Speed optimization from profiling, data structure changes, algorithm selection, divide and conquer, low-level optimization.  Revision control, inspection, code fork prevention, peer programming.  File formats and associated parsers.  User interface design.  Geometry description, adaptive meshing, and method of moments electromagnetic codes.  Numerical conditioning.  Ring 3 equivalents to device drivers.

 

Languages and Tools  C#/C++/C, LINQ, XML, generics/templates, Matlab.  .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5.  Win32 API.  Visual Studio, VTune, VSS.  Familiar with perl, sh/bash, flex/bison, x86 and other flavors of assembly, HTML/CSS, Fortran.  USB 1.1 and 2.0.  System and network administration of Windows, Linux/XFree86.  Power use of most other OSes.

 

 

Education

 

University of Washington  Seattle, Washington.  M.S. Electrical Engineering August 2000 (electromagnetics and signal processing).  Electric field integral equation (EFIE) fast multipole method (FMM) solvers for unified modeling of system on chip ASICs.  Master's thesis project on electromagnetic modeling of USB cables, along with automated synthesis of arbitrary transfer function filters.  3.73/4.00 GPA, passed PhD qualifying exams.

 

Swarthmore College  Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Graduated June 1997.  B.S. Engineering (digital systems), B.A. Studio Art (oil painting).  3.75/4.00 GPA in engineering.  Honcho and Vice-Honcho of Swarthbucklers.  Vice President Tau Beta Pi.

 

 
Publications and Patents

 

Presented one of the most downloaded WCF talks at TechEd 2006 and contributing author too much MSDN documentation to list.  Principal author of USB Electrical Test scripts (available from http://www.usb.org/developers).  Contributing author to parts of the USB 2.0 specification and US patent applications 09/442,857, 09/459,744.

 

 

Non-Geek Interests
 

Mountain biking, skiing, trail building, kayaking, mountaineering, backpacking.  Visual art, particularly painting and photography, and guitars.  Well-written books.  Environmental conservation, vegetarian cooking, Joe Satriani.

 

 

Addresses, references, and other information available upon request.

 

 

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copyright 1995–2007 by Todd West

last modified 2008.05.03