Career
I currently work as an IT Director (Architecture and Principal Support) for Prime Therapeutics LLC, a Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager (PBM) spinoff from Blue Cross Blue Shield. In recent years my primary role has been to lead technical teams responsible for building, deploying and maintaining the various architectural layers of large data warehouses, with particular emphasis on web-based reporting applications. Some of these systems were built for my employers; others were implemented for our customers. Such business intelligence applications are typically comprised of ETL processes that transform and aggregate transactional data into dimensionally modeled data warehouses, which are accessed over the web by geographically disbursed audiences using canned reports or ad hoc query/analysis tools. The BI space has contracted a lot in the past few years and some are predicting that reporting and business intelligence will eventually be subsumed into über systems that bundle BI with ERP, CRM, CMS and other business solutions.
While coding (Java, C, Python) is a particular passion, I'm also very interested in the larger picture of computing and find it rewarding to pursue mastery in a field as broad as technology. Understanding the relationships between networks, architectures, operating systems, languages, protocols, applications, design patterns and algorithms is a fantastic challenge, probably a never-ending quest. The rich backdrop of historical events and odd assortment of characters in IT make the challenge that much more compelling.
Prior to my career in information technology I worked for several small Asian-focused firms primarily in capacities related to Japanese translation and simultaneous intepretation, skills I developed through exchange study at Sophia University in Tokyo and many years of self-study thereafter. My most significant written translation was of the 1997 publication Certification Procedural Manual for Certified Self-Testing Manufacturers of High Pressure Gas Equipment (6th Edition) published by the High Pressure Gas Safety Institute of Japan, an English translation of a 200 page Japanese government reference work commissioned by a U.S. manufacturer of high pressure gas equipment.
