John Sloan

About John Sloan

John Sloan does software and firmware development for very large and very small products on the Internet of Interesting Things: real-time, high-reliability, kernel, new and prototype hardware, board support package, board bring-up, distributed, datacenter, embedded, device drivers, asynchronous, low-level, concurrent, clouds, microcontrollers, interconnected, high-altitude, close to bare metal, systems programming.John is currently the sole employee of Digital Aggregates, a firm he founded in 1995, through which he helps clients plan, architect, design, develop, debug, ship, integrate, troubleshoot, reverse engineer, and support their products. For more than four decades, John has worked in the academic, big science, supercomputing, telecommunications, industrial control, enterprise, business aviation, and defense and intelligence sectors. At Wright State University, he led a systems administration and network engineering group, introducing the campus to UNIX and the Internet. While at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, he was the head of the section responsible for that national lab’s supercomputers, mass storage system, and server farm. While at Lucent Technologies and its spinoffs, John worked on teams to develop, ship, and support telecommunications products and major features, working on some for several release cycles.John has co/authored an article in the Proceedings of the an entry in the Encyclopedia of Computer Science, and many conference papers and technical reports. He is the co/inventor of two patents. John has served on industry and academic advisory panels, has been an invited conference speaker, and has served as a visiting scientist and consultant domestically and abroad. He has worked with remote engineering teams in such exotic locales as China, India, Australia, Scotland, Ireland, England, and New Jersey. He has taught university courses in real-time and embedded software design at the undergraduate and graduate level. He has M.S. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Wright State University in Dayton Ohio.John entertains his friends by writing on business and technology under the pseudonym Chip Overclock®. There are several Raspberry Pi SBCs running 24x7 at the palatial Sloan estate, where (thanks to an understanding spouse) a cesium atomic clock ticks away in the living room near a differential GNSS base station. Due perhaps to his broad skill set, this ambivert has been described by former managers as \"a renaissance man\" and as \"unfocused\".

Experience

1. Principal Consultant

   Digital Aggregates Corporation

   Nov 1995 — Present · Denver, CO, US

   Worked on new business aviation products developed under AS9100 and DO-178C DAL D and tested under DO-160. Developed ARINC 717 and other software portions of IFE business aviation product. Developed custom platform capabilities for an Android-based product. Developed Asterisk channel drivers, codec, and associated device handlers for an Iridium-based SATCOM business aviation product that also supported Inmarsat. Developed PIC microcontroller firmware for building automation sensors and controllers. Hacked PowerPC and ARM Linux kernels and drivers to support new hardware. Developed portions of protocol stack for cellular base transceiver station. Wrote board support package, configured, built and hacked Linux kernel and file systems, and developed device drivers, daemons and applications for custom embedded target. Taught course in embedded development specific to customer\'s code base. Reverse-engineered competitive product and developed firmware emulation. Designed and developed Java framework for web services business orchestration product. Experience with GPS and other GNSS technologies for PNT applications.

Education

• Wright State University

  B.S., Computer Science

  1974 — 1980

• Wright State University

  M.S., Computer Science

  1980 — 1983

Skills

• Distributed Systems
• Systems Programming
• Iridium
• Rtos
• U-Boot
• Atm
• Ipc
• Embedded Software
• Telecommunications
• Product Development
• Embedded Systems
• Public Speaking
• Teaching
• Object Oriented Design
• System Architecture
• Asterisk
• Pic
• Algorithms
• Iot
• Global Positioning System (Gps)
• Voip
• Seandroid
• Arm
• Sockets
• Multithreading
• Powerpc
• University Teaching
• Software Development
• Vxworks
• Python
• Api Design
• Embedded Operating Systems
• Pid
• Android Platform
• Freertos
• Avr
• Atmel Avr
• Avionics
• Posix
• Software Design