Jonathan Glass

This is a simple utility that I wrote and published which unpacks the format of a spreadsheet file and writes it back as a new file. This new file is still a valid sheet and can be opened by Excel, but it can commit and compress much more efficiently into distributed source control systems such as Git and Mercurial.

I acted as co-founder, inventor, designer, and chief software engineer for Schematiq, a revolutionary data productivity platform. This is currently licensed by leading companies in sectors such as financial services and energy.

My primary role has been to manage and prioritize development work and provide architectural vision and creativity to drive the team forward. I have built a culture of excellence-and-continuous improvement through careful management and review processes for team members and through the adoption of a cutting-edge suite of development and productivity tools. As such I have been responsible for everything the team produces, how they work, and the quality of the resulting product.

I have also been personally responsible for developing several important features of the application. This includes an optimized cross-process communication library that's written in C#, a flexible framework of database connectors based on a common semantic SQL model with variants for different technologies' own dialects, and an in-memory columnar tabular model (optimized for memory and performance efficiency and exposed via a declarative and immutable API model).

A distributed calculation grid for Excel-based calculation models; backed onto an Oracle database and message queue. It was scaled up from a handful to several hundred calculation nodes, overcoming barriers in various levels of the infrastructure and application stack to achieve linear scaling of performance. I also implemented a sophisticated algorithm for detection and removal of duplicated states to significantly improve performance and reduce data volume and read performance.

I worked for Microsoft as part of the development team working for a major bank to implement their seven-day account switching infrastructure. I contributed to the functionality of the delivery and also the culture of functional testing, peer review, and performance testing within the team.

Working for a leading energy company, I pitched a proposed architecture for a decision support platform for trading-and-risk management. I ran the project team delivering the solution, designed important aspects of the technical solution and was responsible for liaisoning with the stakeholders throughout, including the testing, user acceptance, and handover.

Based around a library of connectors to strategic systems and a flexible front-end toolset integrated within Excel, the solution allowed the client to leverage their existing investment in systems to their key trading and risk management users—allowing all those involved in the business to work from a single version of truth rather than a variety of fragmented tools and applications as had previously been the case.