John Gotts' Home Page

More information about me.

Recent updates:

2022/06/22: Updated resume. HTML is the preferred format. Text, PostScript, and PDF are also available.

Note that this page is currently intended to be a placeholder for my resume. Hopefully that is obvious from the hand-coded HTML. For more up to date information about me, consult social media.

I am taking time off from the University of Michigan. I originally declared electrical engineering and amassed about six credit years with a full complement of computer engineering and computer science coursework. At the time I was uninterested in electronics and stopped taking classes to resume what I had been doing since I was a child, programming. I started my own Linux consulting company, Linux Savvy Solutions, LLC, but I never had time to get it rolling. During the summer of 1996, I interned at Ford Motor Company's Scientific Research Laboratories, developing a medium-sized (approximately 4000 line) Motif application in ANSI C. After two decades I think it is now safe to reveal that we did all of our work on Linux while it was banned company-wide. Nowadays many vehicle manufacturers, and probably Ford, embed Linux into their vehicles.

During the summer of 1997, I interned in Research Triangle Park, NC, at Avant!, a producer of electrical engineering CAD (computer-aided design) tools and developed a medium-sized (approximately 6000 line) Java application. During the Spring and Winter 1998 terms (July-December), I interned again at Avant! and developed a cross-product documentation system (a mixture of shell and Perl scripts for the back end and C and Tcl/Tk for the front end) and a database visualization tool (C, Tcl/Tk, and Scheme) for their next generation layout editor (11,000 lines of code). I've collaboratively developed a Java implementation of Euchre, implemented a Java Realtime Lab Viewer, and have done some Java and database consulting. I've spent countless hours participating in Linux development mailing lists, submitted hundreds of bug reports for various Linux projects, maintained two kernel modules, submitted one accepted patch to Linus Torvalds, and submitted patches to dozens free software packages. I've written user documentation and even created dozens of SPEC files that are use to create RPMs, some of which probably exist in Fedora and Red Hat Linux to this day.

From 1999-2005, I developed a derivative trading system for F & M Financial Trading Systems. The system was approximately 250,000 lines of C and the user interface was pure XML. During 2005, I worked at Cybernet where I created bug fixes for their VPN product and made software improvements to their machine room. After that I worked for ePrize, mainly fixing bugs in My Coke Rewards, reducing the bug count to zero. For just over eight years I was employed at NetPOS in Ann Arbor, MI, where I added numerous third-party web services integrations. I was responsible for hundreds of bug fixes and feature enhancements including such things as Android support, IPv6 support, HTTP/2 support, and migrating our software to Amazon Web Services. One accomplishment at NetPOS that I consider notable is that I completed well over 90% of my programming assignments early or on schedule.

As of 2017, I have been programming for 31 years and I have been getting paid for programming for 30. I expect to be programming for another 30, both as a professional and a hobbyist.

In my spare time, I enjoy traveling, social photography, blogging, dancing, and working on electronics (mainly repairing broken electronics from eBay).

My resume (text, PostScript, PDF). Please see this page for some of my source code and documentation (mainly from the 1990's).

This page was first created in November, 1993, and was last updated on June 22, 2022. It was originally located at http://www.us.itd.umich.edu/afs/umich.edu/user/j/g/jgotts/Public/jgotts.html and its current location is http://linuxsavvy.com/staff/jgotts/.

Questions? Comments? Send them to me at jgotts@gmail.com.