Mitchell Thomas
Communicator, Designer, Builder
Skills
- Increase team productivity through improved team communications and conflict resolution.
- Grow team planning, design and execution skills through direct collaboration and education.
- Support business objectives through technology selection, design, execution and delivery.
- Promote distributed team architecture through technical patterns, norms and conventions.
Occupation
Dec 2019 - Jan 2022
Open Cybersecurity Alliance
- Member of Technical Steering Committee and Architecture Working Group
Jun 2021 - Present
Tripwire Inc., Portland, OR
- Senior Software Architect, Principal Developer
Managing a small group of strategic architects to direct research into new products such as the Tripwire Anyware suite available as a service and on-premise. Making key contributions in applying Team Topologies Fast Flow organizational methodology to Tripwire R&D. All part of my desire to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of delivering great products to customers.
Aug 2012 - Jun 2021
Tripwire Inc., Portland, OR
- Software Architect, Principle Developer
Key designer and initial contributor to the Tripwire State Analyzer industrial product available in both SaaS and on-premise deployments. Introduced key technologies including Replicated KOTS, Kubernetes, Keycloak, Kafka and Postgres.
Key designer and contributor to Tripwire’s SaaS platform - tripwire.io - the foundation for Tripwire for DevOps and Tripwire ExpertOps key to Tripwire’s strategic cloud initiative. Selected design patterns, technology stack and team convention process doubling release cadence.
Launched Connect, the Tripwire data processing and analytics platform increasing processing scale three fold.
In all these efforts I introduced asynchronous messaging and micro-service patterns, API creation via REST and GraphQL and deployment using containers, Docker and Kubernetes.
2004 - 2009
GemStone Inc., Beaverton, OR
- Architect, Staff Engineer
Designed and coded transactional and partitioned region portions of GemFire, a distributed key/value store. Gemstone was sold to VMWare/Pivotal and is in use today as Apache Geode and Pivotal Gemfire
1996 - 2004
NetGravity Inc. -> DoubleClick Inc., San Mateo, CA
- Lead Engineer
- QA Architect
Lead Engineer creating DoubleClick’s Ad technology acquired by Google in 2007 and still in use today.
Education
1987-1991
BSEE Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA
Patents
US Patent 10,313,257 Agent message delivery fairness describes the messaging design used in the Tripwire Axon agent a critical data collection and processing component for most Tripwire products.
US Patent 9,992,230 Assessing security control quality and state in an information technology infrastructure. Marsha Haverty was the main contributor with my support helping with technical details and the patent filing process. This design presented powerful visualizations integrating multiple security controls to illustrate organizational security status and overall asset coverage.
Technical Interests
- Entity, attribute, time series databases: Datomic and Crux, graph databases: Dgraph
- Asynchronous, message based stream processing: Kafka and ActiveMQ Artemis
- Languages: Clojure, functional Python, Golang, Rust
- Encoding: self describing technologies EDN and Avro
- Distributed File Systems: AFS, Ceph, IPFS
- Kubernetes: deploying in the cloud and on-premise using Replicated KOTS
- IOT: sensors using Particle’s platform for harvesting in-home metrics
- Conservation: Local energy production, home efficiency technologies
- Conway’s Law: shaping team/architectural structure, Inverse Conway Maneuver
- Security: OpenSSF, software supplychain Sigstore and Zero Trust networks