Dave Blumenthal is a professional programmer with over 19 years of software development experience, including 12 years of C/C++. He offers excellent communication skills, strong user interface and object-oriented design abilities, and a background in computer graphics (e.g. OpenGL) and low-level (driver level and embedded) software coding. He has experience developing applications and other software on Windows, UNIX, and Macintosh platforms.

He is currently seeking any work that will challenge his design and programming abilities.

• Worked from a home office, managing my time independently with little need for supervision.
• Designed and implemented a title and text system as a plugin for a client company's video post-production system. Met with engineers from the client to understand plugin requirements and the host API. Helped design and document proposed implementation, and was primary programmer (about 80% of final code) for the entire development cycle. Consulted frequently with client's engineers to keep abreast of ongoing development in the host system. Consulted with client's interface designers to coordinate text system user interface with host user interface. Ultimately completed development of a fully featured title and text system with direct manipulation and widget-based user interfaces, supporting rendering and animation, hierarchical character transformations, arbitrary and animatable text styles, and flexible animatable text layout options.
• Implemented features for a scriptable Adobe After Effects plugin. Improved rendering of Macromedia Flash files and designed an algorithm for correctly rendering the contour-based Flash shapes in our existing scanline renderer. Added 3D rendering capabilities integrated with AE cameras and lights, implemented geometric types including quaternions and meshes, and added utilities including beveling and extruding meshes from contours. This included implementation of features in C++, development of Python APIs for these features, and development of a Python-based scene graph to make the features more easily accessible to content creators. Retuned an existing particle system for better performance and code maintainability, corrected several geometric algorithms, and added new features including the ability for Python scripts to directly control particle behavior. Instructed coworkers, including content creators and our documentation writer, on all these new features, and worked with content creators to fine tune the development of additional features to best support their work.

• Gathered requirements for, designed, and implemented a special effects editor for the PC games Soldier of Fortune II and Jedi Knight II. Worked with programmers, artists and designers to expose the power of the effects system through an intuitive and efficient interface. Created an advanced Windows MFC application using list controls, property sheets, and an OpenGL view, among other user interface elements.
• Wrote several game systems for the PlayStation 2, including a sound system, background music system, and special effects system. Programmed code that interfaced with many hardware and software systems on the architecture, including sound chip registers, DMA engines, CD/DVD access libraries, and graphics libraries. Rewrote example code from Sony for improved multithreaded behavior and proper functionality.

• Responsible for design, development, and project leadership of many portions of a web-browser based 3D rendering and simulation engine, including developing a Netscape plugin, OpenGL graphics backend, event handling system, and Macintosh port.
• Investigated and developed animation utilities, including reliable interactivity, collision detection math, TCP/IP networking, keyframing, camera and shape transformations, and downloadable geometry files. Wrote technical documentation and taught workshops on new techniques. Provided email technical support to content developers outside the company.
• Worked closely with content development team to evaluate and satisfy requirements of the product, and to complete content development projects. Provided technical assistance for a dynamic moon exploration applet. Investigated human-computer interactions for 3D virtual world navigation. Guided content developers in developing distributed computing models.
• Coordinated and participated in the design of a modern object-oriented language for programming interactive graphics applets, evaluating design issues such as subtyping, multiple inheritance, value and reference models, method delegation, exceptions, and function call syntax. Designed a 3D scene graph and rendering pipeline library that was to accompany the new language in a future release of Hypercosm's product set.
• Designed security mechanisms using public-key cryptography to protect intellectual property rights of content developers and to establish licensing revenue for the company.

• Developed OpenGL driver software for workstation graphics boards. Designed and implemented OpenGL in a client side library for UNIX and Windows NT.
• Worked with hardware engineers to fine tune functionality and PCI control protocol for a graphics chip. Wrote C and Alpha assembly language rendering code to pass geometry data to the chip using that protocol. Developed interfaces between client side 3D code and server side 2D X11 and Win32 libraries, consulting with other engineers with expertise in drivers and 2D operations. Constructed functionality tests within a simple Windows NT application. Ran performance analysis of 3D applications and tuned graphics pipelines to optimize for expected application behavior. Worked in Windows NT and UNIX development environments. Worked with software and hardware engineers and quality assurance teams to meet project goals.

• Developed additive music synthesis software on IBM SP/2 supercomputer.
• Researched and developed OpenGL visualizations of music score data with concurrent playback of synthesized audio files, in the CAVE virtual reality environment.

Professor Andrew Chien, Concurrent Systems Architecture Group

• Original research in high performance I/O systems for parallel scientific codes.
• Used MPI and NX message passing libraries on the IBM SP/2, Intel Paragon, SGI Challenge, and Convex Exemplar supercomputers and Sun workstation clusters.

• Produced several real-time animations using OpenGL for the Sounds and Visions concerts, an ongoing series of collaborations between students at the University of Illinois, involving electronic music and real-time and off-line rendered animations.
• Classes and independent study in digital video, animation, and multimedia topics.
• Attended courses and presentations at SIGGRAPH 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2003 conferences.

• Member of the Madison Area Jugglers. Performed several juggling routines with the award winning Mad 5 club-passing team.
• Skydiving mentor at Skydive Chicago in Ottawa, Illinois. Teach freefall and canopy safety and formation skydiving skills to novice skydivers. Was certified as a tandem skydiving instructor, and completed the United States Parachute Association's Basic Instructional Course covering teaching techniques for skydiving skills.