Hello
My name is Brian Ceccarelli. I specialize in data modeling, software architecture and development. In these areas, I am able to give you expert advice and help. If you are a government agency or private firm seeking licensed engineering, I am a PE. If you are an attorney, I am a state-authorized expert in software intellectual property rights, copyrights, trademarks and liability issues. I am also an expert in engineering practice law, with litigation experience concerning unlicensed practice, uncertified plans and unlawful standards of care; e.g, misapplications of physics in engineering specifications.
My Story
My career spans from today's cloud services to yesterday's punch card batch jobs, from transportation engineering to banking. I have a perspective rare among professionals. I have seen waves and waves of changes in computing. Some changes have been for the better. Some changes have been for the worse. Some things have gone full circle. One thing is for sure. I have seen a massive increase in complexity.
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Complexity is good for my job security but bad for businesses. Businesses always desire simplicity. Today's complexity has grown beyond what a single computer programmer can manage. Job specialization has become fine-grained. And yet businesses still seek the one-who-knows-everything. Those people do not exist. Beware of the "full-stack developer" for it is not what the title implies. A full-stack developer may have written a web page, a java class and a SQL statement, but that does mean he knows how to prevent resource contention in the database.
From cloud services to on-premise systems, from distributed computing to single programs, from data structures stored in simple files to terabyte warehouses, I have deep knowledge of them all. I know their purposes and their challenges. I know what to use and when to use it.
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One last thing in which you may find of value in me. My degree is in physics. A physics education is unusual for a computer professional. A knowledge of physics has advantages: 1) Physics trains the mind to think "minimally". The fewest steps to the solution is the one correct solution. All others are wrong. Longer paths or needless iterations in the name of agile, is incorrect let alone expensive. I am confident that when one first takes the time to think about the most efficient way of solving a problem, one can solve the problem in hours instead of months. 2) Physics trains the mind to think in first principles. For example, I justify my code by saying, "I wrote the code this way because it is the mathematically correct thing to do, not because a hundred developers have done it this way before." 3) Physics allows me to correctly analyze data. Data science is not the science of data but rather the "data for science". Science must invoke the scientific method. Arranging data sets to correlate and choosing the appropriate correlation method depend on scientific truths. Data without the scientific method is meaningless, yields statistical fraud and wastes copious amounts of money.
