Mark D. Anderson
mda@discerning.com
San Francisco, California

I have built, shipped and managed several successful products on 
Windows, Unix, and the Web. I am intimately familiar both with OS-level issues
of those operating systems, as well as the requirements for building
scalable, robust distributed systems. I have built GUIs as well as
database backends. 

I am an excellent communicator, and work well with teams.
I can work comfortably in multiple kinds of engineering groups --
regardless of programming language, "object-orientedness", and
process orientation.

Experience:
 1999-Present Founder and CTO, BuildSite
        BuildSite is a b2b company supplying technical information to
        the construction industry.
 1998-Present Founder, Discerning Software
        Discerning Software a consulting firm specializing in Internet
        application architecture whose clients include eBay, Lycos, NetObjects,
        Electronic Classifieds, TimesTen, and SkyMall.
        For example, at Lycos I led the design and implementation of their
        unified "Lycos Network" authentication infrastructure.
        I also built the ecommerce backend for Lycos' MailCity email service.
 1997 Principal Engineer, Rational Software
        I report directly to the executive staff, assisting in strategic
        discussions at all levels of the organization, from company-wide
        to product level. On the outside, I am one of the primary
        technical liasons with Microsoft, and I typically perform the
        technical due diligence for M&A activity.
        I track industry trends as well as competitive activity.
        I work closely with product teams to advocate for
        new markets, products, and feature sets.
 1996 Principal Engineer, Pure Atria (acquired by Rational)
        Moved into the Performix business unit, acquired by Pure Atria,
        to establish regular engineering practices as well as specify
        and design the next generation product. Performix does
        load testing of web, database, and terminal-based systems.
 1995 Principal Engineer, Pure Software
        Wrote the architecture and design for "Bugbert", the next
        generation version bug tracker after the acquired "PureDDTS"
        product. Helped hire and build the implementation team.
        Bugbert is a 3-tier database application with both a native
        win32 and a web front-end.
 1994 Engineering Director, Pure Software
        I managed 3 teams: PureLink, PureVision, and the internal
        tools group.
 1993 Staff Engineer, Pure Software
        Wrote the product PureLink, an incremental linker, in its
        1.0 and 1.1 releases.
        Invented the "river of time" visualization technique for
        the profiler Quantify (patent 5,193,180).
 1989-1992 independent consultant
        Primarily telecomm clients, writing GUIs and system software.

Education:
 1988 Berkeley, Masters Physics
 1986 MIT, Masters Electrical Engineering