Contact: carl@dragnon.com      Home page: https://carlschuyler.com

About

I have worked in software development for 30+ years. I am fascinated by software related to data and semantic processing, e.g. machine learning, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval.

Aside from coding and designing, I’ve authored and taught courses on Java Spring enterprise architecture.

These days I’d call myself a generalist software developer, biased toward backend distributed systems, and data engineering. I’m enthusiastic about clean, lean software development, agile delivery, and collaboration.

I’ve never met a programming language I didn’t appreciate. I’m happy with my hands on the keyboard and unhappy in a silo: I value collaboration and transparency, whereas inflexible organization and rigid process really get me down.

Technical directions

Currently active: Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Python, Bash, TypeScript, Clojure, Datomic, Elasticsearch, Lucene, cloud deployment (Kubernetes, AWS, GCP), AI-assisted coding.

When I have time: Agentic systems (MCP etc), Go, Big Bata, deeper AI, NLP, visualization, Scala, React and modern web application frameworks in general.

Farther out (interests): Haskell, F#, Julia, Rust, PureScript, quantum computing, semantic web and RDF.

Experience

Ritchie Bros — Senior Software Engineer

June 30, 2025 – October 20, 2025 · Westchester, Illinois

Tooling: Java, Snyk, CircleCI, LaunchDarkly, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Amazon Q (Copilot as well), OpenSearch (AWS), Honeycomb, Kubernetes, Retool.

Oracle — Principal Member of Technical Staff / Principal Software Developer

June 17, 2024 – April 11, 2025

Infrastructure behind Visual Builder: services to create and deploy web applications visually. Improved team process, including automation of infrastructure provisioning; focused on team velocity and sustainable delivery. Stack included Java, Python, Bash, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure—SaaS, IaaS, and distributed cloud applications.

Broadcom — Staff Solutions Architect

June 2018 – January 26, 2024 (5 years 8 months)

(Formerly VMware; VMware acquired Pivotal December 31, 2019; Broadcom acquired VMware in a later consolidation.)

• Continuation of the Pivotal / VMware platform and customer-facing solutions work below; engagement spanned the corporate transitions.
• VMware / Pivotal era: Same Staff Solutions Architect track from mid-2018; oldest payslip on file from Pivotal is September 2018.

Thoughtworks — Lead Developer

September 2017 – June 2018 (10 months)

Consulting developer embedded with customer teams on site: cloud software delivery and helping teams adopt agile practice—pair programming, test-driven development, and balanced teams.

• Locations: San Antonio, Cincinnati.

CA Technologies — Senior Software Engineer

July 2010 – August 2017 · 7 years 2 months · Boulder, Colorado

(CA acquired Rally Software July 2015; CA was later acquired by Broadcom.)

CA’s Agile business unit built SaaS tools for agile teams. I worked primarily on Rally Software (also known as CA Agile Central): an agile lifecycle management product for developers and stakeholders, as a generalist developer. Roles also included DevOps, deployment, support, technical leadership, mentoring, advocating for innovation, and presenting.

Process was grounded in agile and lean practice: continuous deployment, Scrum, pairing, TDD, and Kanban/lean. The team helped introduce the SAFe enterprise agile-at-scale framework.

Back-end focus on a large legacy Java application and newer Clojure components: performance work, refactoring for effective use of EclipseLink ORM, quality through pairing and pull-request review, Kafka and Hazelcast for scalability. Other technologies included Oracle, GitHub, Linux, and Docker.

Notable project threads:

• Modernized and expanded full-text search (Solr upgrade, faceting, boosting, relevance); re-architected deployment and moved search stack toward Elasticsearch.
• Object change notification infrastructure to collect, aggregate, and distribute changes across components and external applications—Clojure-centric greenfield work including Datomic.
• Full-stack work on legacy Java with a JavaScript front end (mostly Ext JS) and Java / ORM / Oracle back end.

Overstock.com — Senior Developer

November 2009 – December 2009 · 2 months

Web site and internal systems—mostly Java web and backend programming.

Thoughtworks — Consultant / Senior Developer

August 2007 – May 2009 · 1 year 10 months · San Francisco and Chicago

Consulting across development, automation, QA, and organizational enablement—often open source stacks and agile delivery. Work included Ruby, Java, and web technologies for test automation, software quality metrics tooling, and varied Java, SQL, and web-stack development.

DeepData — Consultant

December 2006 – August 2007 · 9 months

Correlation, filtering, and augmentation of data feeds using Ruby, statistical methods, and NLP.

Ask.com — Senior Research Engineer

March 2006 – November 2006 · 9 months · Oakland, California

Built Ask Local: maps, locale, and reviews search in an R&D setting. Information retrieval, ranking for vertical (faceted) search, web crawling, geographic search—statistics, NLP, IR, and language intuition; led projects and mentored peers.

Technologies: C#, C++, SQL, Perl, ASP.NET, C, IIS, Subversion, Windows, Linux.

Aplicor International — Office Director and Development Team Lead

September 2005 – March 2006 · 7 months · San José, Costa Rica

Team lead: Enhanced a hosted CRM product for mid-size organizations. C#, ASP.NET, JavaScript, Ajax, SQL Server. Code generation, metadata-driven relational framework, TDD, continuous integration, agile methods, distributed teams, refactoring.

Director: Day-to-day operations of a seven-person office—HR, payroll, purchasing, project management, and operations.

Horizon 20 Inc. — Chief Software Architect

September 2003 – September 2005 · 2 years 1 month · San José, Costa Rica

Head of software: six developers; business liaison and PM for software projects. Roughly 80% design, implementation, and test; 15% technical management. C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server, ASP, MFC, C/C++. Backend services harvesting and transforming data for internal and customer-facing web sites (online betting). Drove migration from a older two-tier architecture toward a more modern, multi-tier, highly available, manageable platform while shipping new features.

Intel Corporation — Senior Programmer / Analyst

September 2001 – September 2003 · 2 years 1 month · San José, Costa Rica

Individual contributor and technical lead. One year on an ETL engine in C++ with Oracle Call Interface, ODBC, Teradata, SAP RFC, and SQL Server 2000—replacing a legacy pipeline for performance, stability, and operability. One year as technical lead on an enterprise indicators system: business users maintained performance and health metrics via a flexible web UI—ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server.

ExpLore Reasoning Systems — Senior Consultant

March 2000 – May 2001 · 1 year 3 months · McLean, Virginia

Personal-assistant style application: aggregation, HTML screen scraping, scheduling, and smart transcoding of XML and HTML for PCs, PDAs, and phones (Java, XML, HTTP/HTTPS, imaging). Financial planning system for a major New York financial firm (JDBC, XML, XSLT, RTF, PDF). Network diagnostic tool for a large networking vendor—fault diagnosis in Java, C (JNI), and Art*Enterprise (rules and case-based reasoning).

American Management Systems (now CGI-AMS) — Senior Technical Staff

May 1998 – March 2000 · 1 year 11 months · Düsseldorf, Germany

Workflow scheduling for customer care and billing for a German telecom carrier—ISO 9001 program, on the order of 350 developers. Component computed resource availability and scheduled tasks with complex dependency graphs. HP-UX, rule- and constraint-based programming, C++, Oracle, Ilog Rules, Ilog Solver/Scheduler.

ExpLore Reasoning Systems — Consultant

June 1996 – May 1998 · 2 years · McLean, Virginia

Web-based insurance claims adjustment (Java applet, RMI, JDBC / Soar server). Data analysis engine for segmenting and tracking populations for a credit-card risk group (C++, Pro*C, CORBA, HP-UX). Call-center workflow engine (Perl, CLIPS, C, Lex/Yacc, OS/2).

TASC — Member of Technical Staff

April 1993 – June 1996 · 3 years 3 months · Reston, Virginia

NLP software: data extraction and knowledge modeling; system competed in MUC-4 (ARPA Message Understanding Conference). Domain-specific information extraction (“text miners”) for subject-matter analysts. Integrated information retrieval, visualization, and in-house extraction for analyst workflows.

IICA (Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura) — Intern

1991–1992 · San José, Costa Rica

Summer intern via MUCIA (Midwestern Universities Consortium for International Activities). IICA is part of the Organization of American States, focused on animal and plant health in the Americas. Automated and consolidated information systems using PC database tools (dBase); learned Spanish.

Argonne National Laboratory — Intern

1991 · Argonne, Illinois · less than one year

Fortran for modeling liquid-metal-cooled reactors; mathematical modeling; VAX/VMS.

GTE Laboratories — Summer Intern

1991 · Waltham, Massachusetts · less than one year

Multimedia information retrieval prototype using X/Motif and Unix.

Selected projects and engagements

Representative initiatives across employers (approximate periods where noted):

• Asset Management (Ritchie Bros) - 2025: Java, Postgres, Kafka. Replacement of legacy system.
• Cloud Infrastructure (Oracle) - 2024: Java and OCI. Data and Control Plane development for Oracle Visual Builder.
• Video and Chat (VMware) - 2023: Go. Video streaming and chat.
• LMS, Education (VMware) — 2021–2023: Java, Elm, Kubernetes. Self-paced online Java Architecture education.
• NAVICA (VMware) — 2020: iOS, Swift. Mobile app for contact tracing.
• Groundskeeper (Pivotal) — 2019: Elm, Kotlin; auto-provisioning of users, accounts, and virtual environments; Conductor (Netflix open-source workflow engine).
• Education (Pivotal) — 2018: Java course code bases; nontrivial Git workflows. Authored and presented live courses on Java, Spring, and REST.
• Object Changes and Search (Rally) — 2016–2017: EclipseLink, Oracle, Kafka data pipeline, Solr then Elasticsearch, Clojure, Datomic.
• ALM Zuul (Rally) — 2015: Clojure; authentication for agile lifecycle management.
• New Code Quality Dashboard (Thoughtworks) — San Francisco, 2007: Ruby on Rails. Code-quality dashboard (complexity, cohesion, change-focused metrics).
• Ask Local (Ask.com): maps, locale, and reviews search.

Education

Tufts University

September 1987 – June 1991

B.A. in Mathematics and B.S. in Computer Science (2 degrees).

The Ohio State University — Columbus

August 1991 – March 1993

M.S. in Computer and Information Science, concentration in Computational Linguistics.

References

Available upon request.

Fun Facts

• I’m an amateur polyglot! I speak seven languages to varying degrees of fluency. I am fluent in English, Spanish, and French.
• I’m an avid traveler and have lived in Belgium, Costa Rica, Germany, and Hungary, in addition to the United States.
• I love to cook (and eat), and am always interested in new techniques and flavors from around the world.