Bruce Defrang

Background

About Bruce Defrang

I realized I wanted to program computers in high school. AT & T hosted an Explorer Scout post, teaching youth to program computers. I was hooked. I wish I could remember the name of the person that led us, for I am very grateful for this experience. One thing I really love about programming is that it never gets old. There are always new technologies coming along to keep things from getting stagnant. Instead of your workday being the same as every other day and dragging on, it is fun and engaging. How many people can say that about their career? Early in my career I decided that working for a software company would expand my skills. Many software companies are on the cutting edge, and have top-notch engineers working for them. This really payed off for me. I was exposed to both great thinkers and advanced techniques. At the same time I encountered a lot of bad design and bad code. I believe the whole experience has contributed to my professional growth. Not only do I have an "instinct" for good techniques and approaches, I also can recognize the bad and know to avoid them. I have had the benefit of being on some very large multi-year projects. This has fostered in me the ability to plan out large features and see them through to completion. A recent examples of this is a clustering feature I recently lead (utilizing MySQL Group Replication). This involved changes to almost every component of the product, including multiple languages (Java, C, C++, Perl, PHP, and shell scripts). Significant changes were required to a large database schema. The whole thing took a couple years for a team of three people (including myself). My career to date has developed critical thinking skills in me. If you look at my accomplishments you will see that I have co-authored 9 US patents. My specialties include Java, C++, and SQL Databases. I have worked with many Java technologies (such as JMS, JPA, OSGi) and a lot of third-party components.