David Williams

Objective

To make great software that people really like using, and in the process to build a great company that people like working for.

Summary

Experienced leader, engineer and innovator who has played a key role in the development of dozens of successful products used by 100s of millions of users.

Leader of engineering teams (development, QA, release, PM) from 3 to 50 strong.

Technical lead or principle developer on a wide gamut of products from development tools, system software, virtual machines and web browsers to creative tools, entertainment and education applications.

Holder of 20 US Patents in mobile, content delivery and development technology.

Keywords

I have worked in many areas: mobile, IoT, web technology; virtual machine, computer language, and programming platforms; UI, multi-media, mapping and location based systems. A few keywords:

• Language: Java, C/C++, Swift, Objective-C, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Sh, PostScript, Various Assembler.
• OS: watchOS, iOS, macOS, Android, DangerOS, Un*x/Linux, Palm OS, EPOC/Symbian, RIM, BREW, Windows.
• Web: [X]HTML, CSS, SVG, XML, etc.. (implemented and coded)
• Other: SQLite, Postgres, Oracle, MySQL, OpenGL, Core Graphics, Core Audio, MapKit, WebKit, SceneKit, JVM.

Work experience

Apple Inc. Cupertino, CA September 2018 - Present.
Engineer

• Building insanely great products!

Descript, Inc. San Francisco, CA September 2017 - 2018.
Engineer

• Descript, Inc. is building a new category of media creation tool that makes audio & video editing, as easy as editing text.
• Descript was born out of the same named creative tool I developed at Detour. A founding employee, worked on expanding the platform reach of Descript from MacOS; to Windows, Linux and Web.

Detour San Francisco, CA 2015 - 2017.
Engineer

• Developed Detour's tool for creating creating our augmented reality audio tours - Descript.
• Detour's Descript provided mapping tools to layout and edit geo-location based paths, outdoor or indoor; audio tools for multi track sample based editing and sound design; and word processing capabilities for editing scripts, testing scratch audio, and ultimately incorporating the audio word processor capabilities that provided the foundation for Descript, Inc..
• Co-developed the Detour audio engine for MacOS/iOS, on Core Audio/AV.
• Worked closely with the Detour creative team to develop the 100s of location aware outdoor walking, biking and driving audio tours, and with museum curators to develop indoor location based museum tours including the award winning SFMOMA guided tours.
• Detour was acquired by Bose to drive their AR endeavors

Sopwith Software. San Francisco, CA 2013 - 2017.
Principle

• Sopwith develops Avionics simulation software.

NOOK Media, LLC (a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble) Palo Alto, CA, 2011 - 2013.
Director of Software

• Led application software development for the NOOK™ line of digital reading products: NOOK Simple Touch, Glowlight, Color, Tablet, HD and HD+; NOOK for Android, NOOK for iOS, and NOOK for Windows 8.
• Hired and managed a team of ~50 engineers and engineering managers, contractors and consultants in Palo Alto, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Thailand and Russia.
• Led the team through dozens of product releases, averaging 3 new hardware platforms per year and a software release every two weeks.
• Reorganized the team from redundant silos per platform/product into a more modular, cross platform structure; enabling a greater range of products and increasing the speed that features could be released across the portfolio, improving product quality through greater re-use, and increasing moral across the team.
• Led software development for NOOK Simple Touch (now NOOK Glowlight), the first E-Ink based reader with touch, and NOOK's most long lived (and currently only in-house) hardware product.
• Initiated, staffed and over saw many key content initiatives, including: NOOK Comics, (new) NOOK Newspapers, multi-platform NOOK for Kids (picture books), fixed format content, downloadable dictionaries, NOOK for Web.

Moteiv / Sentilla Corporation. Redwood City, CA, September 2007 - May 2010.
Head of Engineering, July 2008 - May 2010.

• Responsible for all software and hardware development, QA and release activities at Sentilla.
• Led the development of Sentilla's Pervasive Computing platform - built on Sentilla's postage stamp sized, Java Powered, wireless, ultra low power technology for the Internet of Things. Winner of the 2008 Duke's award, Sentilla's "Mini" was introduced by James Gosling at JavaOne as the world's smallest Java computer.
• Led development of Sentilla's range of ready to run application products including Sentilla Energy Manager - an energy management solution for managing power in data centers. Built on J2EE/Glassfish, Linux, Python, and Postgres, SEM is delivered as a ready to run 1U appliance.
• Developed product specifications; researched vendors and specified 3rd-party hardware and software components; organized the team to best capitalize on Sentilla's core competences and to deliver industry leading products in a timely fashion.

Danger, Inc. Palo Alto, CA, September 2002 - September 2007.
Director, Browser Engineering.

• Manager and lead engineer responsible for Danger's web, WAP and scripting technologies.
• Led engineering team designing and developing the 2.0 Danger web browser. The Danger 2.0 web browser uses a client / server architecture. The client side is implemented in Java and runs on a 50 MHz ARM powered hiptop. The server side is a farm of Linux machines running a multi server content transcoder implemented in C++. The browser provides good performance and all the modern features users expect in a web browser - rich HTML/XHTML, color and style support, JavaScript, security, and tight integration with the Danger OS and hardware.
• Designed and developed many server side components, including the HTML byte code emitter, headless proxy rendering engine, ...
• Designed and developed the device side DOM, event, drawing, selection, scaling and zooming subsystems; Java and JavaScript language bindings. Designed many subsystems to provide a manageable balance between features and performance. Worked with the rest of the team to develop the JavaScript language engine and Browser application features.
• Using a combination of C and ARM assembly, enhanced the Danger JVM and tool system to include support for floating point, java.lang.Math, 64 bit integers, and wide instructions.
• Developed many non-Browser features in the Danger platform, including: JVM, networking, graphics libs, spell check and global find.
• Managed and helped maintain the deployed Danger 1.0 legacy web browser (a crufty old code base), while the new browser was written from scratch.
• Implemented the WMLScript language module, WTIA telephony, and other features of the Danger WAP browser.
• Worked closely with Systems Engineering and NOC teams to provide users with a reliable, high performance browsing experience.

AvantGo, Inc. San Mateo, CA, May 1998 - September 2002.
Chief Engineer, July 2002 - September 2002.

• In my four plus years at AvantGo, I was the principle designer, and lead developer for the bulk of AvantGo's handheld technology. In addition, I managed 20 engineers and 2 first level managers, and lead the release of the AvantGo 5.0 product - AvantGo's most sophisticated undertaking. I finished up as Chief Engineer for the company, with overall responsibility for technical decisions on all products.

Manager, Browser Engineering, July 2001 - June 2002.
Manager, Web Technology Team, July 2000 - June 2001.

• Principle designer, engineer, and later project manager for AvantGo 5.0 browser. AvantGo 5.0 is the most advanced handheld browser available with support for all modern standards such as Dynamic HTML 4.01 / XHTML 1.0, CSS I/II, DOM Level I/II, and JavaScript 1.4. AvantGo 5.0 uses a distributed client/server model, with the server running on Win32 and Unix, and the client running on PalmOS, WinCE, Win32, RIM, Symbian EPOC, and Linux.
• Designed a very low footprint, cross platform database system for handhelds with support for C/C++/JavaScript APIs. Developed an implementation on Palm, then lead development on 4 other platforms. This project provided the base technology for the On-device database access and XML data sync for web-based applications of AvantGo's M-Business Anywhere Application Edition product.
• Designed and developed a tool which takes interface definitions in IDL and generates bindings, header files, and stubs for C/C++ and dynamically bound languages (JavaScript/Java).
• Designed and developed with QA an automated test harness to exercise the browser's parser, DOM and layout engine and test for failures and other regressions.
• Manager of 20 person browser engineering team, including 2 first level managers.
• Designed, and lead development of the AvantGo 5 release party.

Architect, Handheld Web Products, May 1999 - June 2000.

• Designed and developed the AvantGo 5 HTML engine - a low footprint, high performance, web browser engine supporting Dynamic HTML 4.01 / XHTML 1.0, CSS I/II, DOM Level I/II, with C/C++ APIs and dynamic bindings for script languages like JavaScript.
• To provide a rich feature set within the constraints of handheld devices, many innovative technologies where developed, including: sophisticated memory managers, soft copy on write virtual memory, a powerful cross platform graphics sub-system, server side proxy layout, multi-language API binding system, and more.
• Developed multi platform development framework with support for PalmOS, Symbian EPOC, RIM, PocketPC/WinCE, Win32, and Linux/Unix.
• This core engine became the basis of AvantGo's enterprise and consumer products from AvantGo 5 forward. The high portability of the code base, and the development methodology established, has allowed AvantGo to support all the significant handheld OS platforms with relative ease.

Senior Engineer, May 1998 - April 1999.

• Senior Engineer developing AvantGo browser 1.X through 3.X for PalmOS. Designed and developed many browser features including find, HTML SCRIBBLE (digital ink) tag, Symbol scanner support, color support, C/C++ plugins mechanism, and on device DOM interface. Improved font support, and added support for user installable font families. Improved HTML layout engine, adding new tags and improving performance.
• Developed new multi-segment linker for PalmOS (multilink), enabling applications > 64k in size. Enhanced existing PalmOS tools: gcc, build-prc, and ppmtoTbmp, etc.

Netscape Communications Corporation. Mountain View, CA, Jan 1996 - April 1998.
Senior Engineer.

• Sole engineer developing Navigator 3.0 Gold for Unix (Gold added an integrated HTML page editor to the standard Navigator). Designed and developed HTML page editor user interface, render engine enhancements, platform specific save/publish libraries, editor engine, etc. Co-developed cross-platform editor core (from 2.02, through 3.0 and 4.0). Ported to 14 Unix platforms, established organization wide C++ development environment on those platforms. Also, developed many enhancements for 3.0 Netscape Navigator browser client, including tool tips, documentation strings, etc.
• Lead engineer for Communicator 4.0 Composer (HTML Page Editor) and Messenger HTML Compose (HTML Mail Editor). Co-designed and developed new 4.0 user interface framework, Composer and Message Compose (HTML & Plain Text) user interfaces. Enhanced core editor engine, render engine. Developed many enhancements for Navigator browser, including color pickers, file picker, etc. Acted as senior consultant to team members for design issues, development tools, etc. Developed many development tools, including: easy to use performance profiler integrated into Navigator, and a tool (gtscc) for automatic rescoping of program elements through dependency analysis and controlled recompilation. Ported Communicator and Navigator to MkLinux/Linux-ppc (for fun).
• Member of team developing Grendel, a Java based mail client for Netscape's Java based 'Javagator' web client.
• Technical lead for client cross platform technology team, with responsibility for Navigator/Mozilla's HTML layout, imaging, and general cross platform portability.
• Helped drive establishment of mozilla.org, responsible for 'freeing' the cross platform (and a lot of the X user interface) code in Navigator.
• Wrote a C++ Portability Guide to provide guidelines to new mozilla.org contributors.

Kaleida Labs, Inc. Mountain View, CA, July 1994 - Dec 1995.
Staff Engineer.

• Senior engineer developing the ScriptX multimedia programming language. ScriptX combines a dynamic, object oriented language, and VM, with a rich multimedia class library. ScriptX titles run with 100% portability on Windows(3.1,95), MacOS (68k, PowerPC), OS/2. Winner 1996 New Media magazine Hyper Award for multimedia tools.
• Co-designed, and developed a new persistent object storage system for ScriptX, tightly integrated with the language VM, GC, etc..
• Designed and developed high performance, low footprint storage sub-system with excellent dynamic load performance from CD-ROM, and net-based servers.
• Worked with ScriptX developer Calliope to develop the highly regarded Crazy for Ragtime title.
• Supported marketing team at trade shows and demos.

Lucid Inc. Menlo Park, CA, May 1991 - June 1994.
Senior Scientist.

• Lead user interface engineer for Lucid's award winning Energize Programming System. Energize uses a distributed object oriented, client/server architecture, and provides a powerful, integrated, incremental development environment for C/C++ programmers. Winner of the 1992 Software Development Magazine JOLT Product Excellence Award in Languages & Development Environments.
• Design responsibility for all user interface components, including the UI revamp of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs).
• Developed GUI tools and libraries, including the graphical object hierarchy, and call tree browser.
• Developed large components of Energize's leading edge object oriented kernel.
• Architect for internationalization of Energize, developed I18N libraries on three platforms.
• Designed and developed installation system for product.
• Represented company at technical seminars, panels, trade shows, customer site visits.
• Worked with marketing to develop marketing materials and strategies for Energize.
• Presented in 30 minute demonstration video for Energize.

Hewlett Packard. February 1985 - May 1991.
Senior Software Engineer, Scientific Instrument Division,Palo Alto,CA, July 89 - May 91.

• Member of lab team developing a new laboratory information management system (LIMS). Specified, designed, and implemented a smart object archival system, easy to use database creation tool, and several system support modules. Designed and persistent object library layered on Oracle RDBMS.
• Developed many tools to improve team productivity, including improved Oracle SQL 'C' pre-processor, source control management tools, and documentation tools.
• Led team to investigate next generation user interface for the system.

Senior Technical Support Engineer, Australian Software Organisation, Mar 88 - June 89.

• Team leader for group supporting HP SQL tools (4GL, QUERY, report writer, etc..).
• Developed tool for automatic generation of applications from database schema.
• Developed training materials, edited newsletter, customer consulting, managed Beta Sites.
• Investigated next generation visual programming, and SQL tools.
• This position involved extensive work in US, Canada, Germany, UK, and Australia.

Technical Support Specialist, Computer System Division, Cupertino, CA, June 87 - Feb 88.

• Provided technical, and sales support to US and Canadian HP divisions, field sales and support teams.
• Trained engineers, support teams and customers in HP ALLBASE/4GL.

Software Development Engineer, Australian Software Organisation, Feb 85 - June 87.

• Member of lab team developing HP Allbase/4GL - a visual programming tool, and language for developing cross-platform RDBMS applications. Development work included user interface, language parsing, virtual machine (byte code) development.
• Invented, designed and implemented a new high-speed tape archival tool for UNIX: ftio(1) - still (!) included as part of the standard HP UNIX shipment.
• System manager for network of 6 HP 9000 UNIX, and HP 3000 machines.
• Developed Austpac/X.25 PAD control and monitoring software.
• Developed software suite for automated performance testing, data reduction, presentation.

Other Interesting Hacks

• mespell - Java J2ME spell check/suggestion library using affix description, and optimized for a resource limited environment.
• cassiCal - a web based iCalendar subscription for aviation equipment and personnel schedules. Integrates with Google calendar, iCal, iPhone maps, dialing, etc..
• multilink - the multi-segment linker for PalmOS applications. Multilink was the first tool to enable applications > 64k on PalmOS.
• par - the PalmOS database Swiss army knife.
• Victor 3.5 - 100,000 users can't be wrong :-)
• MacOS extensions enhancing PowerBook, and Mac Classic machines.
• SunOS TCP/IP based multi-timbral audio compositor/server, MIDI-player client.
• Simple MIDI-player program for HP workstations.
• MIDI librarian, and data stream processor OS extension for Atari ST.
• Developed very fast DAG layout algorithm, later incorporated into Energize.
• Numerous utilities for Apple II (long time ago).

Patents

• United States Patent 7,337,173 Compiler having global element optimization
• United States Patent 6,341,316 System, method, and computer program product for synchronizing content between a server and a client based on state information
• United States Patent 6,421,717 System, method, and computer program product for customizing channels, content, and data for mobile devices
• United States Patent 6,553,412 System, method, and computer program product for web content aggregation and development, and web content delivery to clients
• United States Patent 6,779,042 System, method, and computer program product for enabling on-device servers, offline forms, and dynamic ad tracking on mobile devices
• United States Patent 6,839,744 System, method, and computer program product for administering channels, content, and data for mobile devices
• United States Patent 7,000,032 System, method, and computer program product for syncing to mobile devices
• United States Patent 7,263,547 System, method, and computer program product for customizing channels, content, and data for mobile devices
• United States Patent 7,840,647 System, method, and computer program product for executing scripts on mobile devices
• United States Patent 7,987,420 System, Method, and Computer Program Product for a Scalable, Configurable, Client/Server, Cross-Platform Browser for Mobile Devices
• United States Patent 8,595,308 System, method, and computer program product for server side processing in a mobile device environment
• United States Patent 9,456,048 System, method, and computer program product for server side processing in a mobile device environment
• United States Patent 9,953,584 Lighting techniques for display devices
• United States Patent 10,269,303 Lighting techniques for display devices
• United States Patent 10,445,052 Platform for producing and delivering media content
• United States Patent 10,564,817 Techniques for creating and presenting media content
• United States Patent 10,923,043 Lighting techniques for display devices
• United States Patent 11,228,864 Generating unexpected location notifications
• United States Patent 11,262,970 Platform for producing and delivering media content
• United States Patent 11,294,542 Techniques for creating and presenting media content

Education

Activities and interests

© 1995-2022 David Williams <djw@djw.org>