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This is the personal web site of Dale Brayden.
I started the site in 2002 because I wanted my own
wiki. I started using
TWiki in 1999 while working at
SDI, a small
company in Vancouver, WA. We used TWiki internally for documentation and project collaboration (because walking the ten feet
between offices would have been
so last year). I was hooked almost immediately.
I use the site as a notebook.
There are
lots of links,
a
reading list,
a
few
pages
of
original
content,
a
TWiki skin that I wrote in 2003,
and a
TWiki plugin, also from 2003.
I am married to an amazing woman named
Joanne.
Until last year we had a sweet old dog, a 14 year old Akita / German Shephard mix. Now we have two Shiba dogs named Yuki and Mochi.
We now live in Seattle after a nearly four year stint in
Minnesota. We are really happy to be back in the Pacific Northwest.
I am a software developer with many years of successful experience primarily in the area of manufacturing automation.
Years ago I worked for Tektronix, developing manufacturing support systems for their semiconductor manufacturing operations.
After several years I made the mistake of moving to the Tektronix's Computer Aided Engineering division.
After a few weeks I concluded that Tektronix CAE was destined for the scrap-heap.
Tektronix concluded the same thing a year later.
In the meantime I left the company to work as an independent contractor.
Contracting was mostly a positive experience: lots of small, 2 to 12 month projects; technical variety; and exposure to basic
business operation.
After 4 years of contracting I had the opportunity to work full-time for a startup,
Systematic Designs (SDI),
that had obtained the contract to develop a large automation system for a semiconductor fab in Tsukuba, Japan.
I wound up staying with the company for nearly 13 years, except for about 16 months in the middle when I went to work for an even smaller
startup.
The SDI experience was positive. Not very financially rewarding, but worthwhile.
Most of our work was in Asia, in Japan and Taiwan, and just a little in Korea.
I figure I traveled to Japan 30 times, for periods of a few days up to 6 weeks.
In all I've spent nearly 2 years in Japan, most of it in the Tokyo area. I also traveled once to Milan, and all over
the United States from Los Angeles to Texas to Boston.
SDI was hit pretty hard by the downturn in the semiconductor industry.
That, coupled with the fact the company owner moved most of his operation to Taiwan to save on labor costs, led to the virtual disbandment of the USA side of the company. I left in November 2003.
About 2 weeks later I received a job offer from Guidant Corporation, a manufacturer of implantable medical devices. I had worked with Guidant on a project while I was at SDi, and I had a lot of respect for the company culture, ethics, people, and competencies. I accepted the offer, gladly.
I developed a number of manufacturing systems and applications for Guidant's Cardiac Rhythm Management division during the nearly four years at Guidant.
In the summer of 2007 I was given an opportunity to work at Amazon as a software development engineer, in Seattle. I was not inclined to say no, so I'm now learning all about how to automate infrastructure management for a company that has a huge amount of infrastructure, and that knows a thing or two about massive scale. It's a big change, and a huge challenge for me.
My
Resumé has a partial list of projects.
I've found that working for a company means spending lots of time and effort on projects that aren't
very interesting or significant in the long-term.
But occasionally it's possible to do something worthwhile.
The projects I'm most happy about were:
- SPL (State Programming Language): I designed and implemented a language on top of C that allowed the easy and direct expression of Harel statecharts. Basically, nested states were represented as nested code. I implemented the language as a sort of uber-preprocessor with full knowledge of C syntax, thus allowing complete integration of the statechart syntax with C syntax. The result was a very expressive language that was easy to code, easy to read, and (relatively) easy to debug.
- SCG (State Code Generator): I had developed SPL at one company, then moved back to Systematic Designs, so I wasn't able to use SPL any longer. But my project team still needed a way to easily represent state machines. So I developed a tool using a very different approach from SPL. Instead of embedding a language, I wrote a GUI in which the state machine could be represented hierarchically, and which provided an editor for hanging code onto the states and the events that drove the state machine. The tool was closely integrated with Microsoft COM, and was able to read interface definitions from COM objects, thus allowing auto-generation of COM event stubs. In all, it was a great productivity-enhancing tool. As a final touch, I had the tool auto-generate state diagrams (using graphviz). This gave us the benefits of state diagrams without all the fiddly time-wasting activity of creating the diagrams by hand.
- Micro Scheduler: The manufacturing automation project in Tsukuba was intended as a first step towards 'lights-out' automation. We controlled the inter-machine robots, the stockers, and equipment recipes and operation. One of my responsibilities was to design and write the 'scheduler' for the automation system. In the end, the scheduler was a material dispatcher based on a 'pull' approach: when an equipment was able to receive new material, the dispatcher would select the best available material to send to it. Having tried a number of other approaches, the pull-dispatcher turned out to be efficient, understandable, and very reliable.
- The SDI GEM/SECS product line: When I rejoined SDi at the end of 1995 the company was considering its future technical direction. I pushed for migration from the Unix platforms to Windows NT, because NT was gaining significant ground among semiconductor manufacturers and semiconductor equipment manufacturers. Over the next 2 years I designed and led the implementation of a suite of applications and tools for the construction of semiconductor manufacturing applications, all based on the SECS and GEM standards. We had good success in the marketplace, and eventually wound up selling the product line to a competitor.
Since I mentioned my two earlier statechart-related tools, I may as well mention the latest.
I recently built a tool that takes a statechart description, written in xml, and produces source code that
implements the state machine. It was fantastically easy to do this - about an afternoon. I had immediate need
for such a tool because I had a non-trivial state machine that needed to be made even more non-trivial. The tool
made this a very straight-forward and error-free process.
Interestingly, a few weeks after I built this tool, I ran across
State Chart XML,
a specification at
W3C to define an xml syntax and semantics for defining
statecharts. The syntax was about 80% identical to the one I had come up with, and the semantics was closer to 90%.
Recently, I've been
(re)learning Spanish.
I studied Spanish in high school, enough that I was able to test out of the University 2-year language requirement.
Growing up in Tucson, AZ I had plenty of opportunity to speak and read Spanish, but after I moved to the Pacific
Northwest I stopped using the language. I decided recently that I should get back up to speed.
I've been teaching myself to play the piano. Actually, for a couple months I haven't practiced, but come autumn I
should have more time and motivation to get back to it. Having played the guitar since I was a boy, the piano is a little
challenging. Getting left hand and right hand to do their things independently has been ... interesting.
So far I've learned to play Bach's
Prelude in C fairly well, and I can stumble my way painfully
through most of Beethoven's
Minuet in G.
I
read quite a lot.
My wife and I take good advantage of our
local library.
When we moved from Vancouver to Minnesota we sold and gave away nearly 2000 books.
Since then we've limited our book purchases to technical (computer) and other reference books.
The library is also a great source of magazines and journals. We go every week, so I can keep up with the latest
issues of
The Nation and
The New York Review of Books, among others.
We're getting back into the swing of things here in the northwest. We've neither of us lived in Seattle before, though we've visited many times, in my case starting from when I was seven years old.We live in West Seattle, near plenty of restaurants, shopping, and entertainments.
Other than that, I spend time at home surfing the web, walking the dogs, watching TV, and writing little bits o' ruby code.
-
Seattle, November 2007
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