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Director of Development
Rick Hightower is the Director of Development. He
leads the adoption of new processes like Extreme
Programming, and helps implement coding standards and
guidelines for development. He has also created an
extensible caching mechanism for caching JSPs, XSLTs,
and JDBC results and a pluggable XSLT engine framework.
Rick’s publications include Python Programming
with the Java Class Libraries (forthcoming from
Addison-Wesley), contributions to Java Distributed
Objects (published by Sams), frequent articles in Java
Developer’s Journal. Rick has also taught classes on
developing Enterprise JavaBeans, JDBC, CORBA, Applets as
CORBA clients, and EJB.
Rick Hightower is a
software engineer at heart who specializes in software
development tools and processes, and developing
enterprise applications using J2EE, XML, UML, CORBA,
JDBC, SQL, and Oracle technologies. Formerly he was the
Senior Software Engineer for Java Architecture at
Intel’s Enterprise Architecture Lab. At Intel he lead a
team of developers, designing and implementing three
tier client-server applications, introduced O-O CASE
tools, and created several frameworks using a variety of
Java, COM, CORBA, middleware technologies. Rick also
created ICBeans and authored the patent application for
this technology, which was awarded to Intel.
As
Director of Architecture at Buzzeo, Rick was responsible
for adding next generation features to the ZEOLogix
servers (CORBA-based EJB server) and the CORBA component
wizard; talking to investors and potential customers
about technology and technology vision; and leading
engineering team with product and technology vision and
direction. He developed a framework for writing
applications that use a business rules engine, workflow,
database access, CORBA and Enterprise JavaBeans. The
framework uses mementos, abstract factory and other
design patterns to aid in the parallel development of
multi-tier applications.
Currently, in addition
to work, Rick is working on his next project, which is a
book that covers applying XP sytle automated testing and
continous integration to a J2EE environment.
While at eBlox, Rick instituted a well received
training and certification plan so that eBlox
developers, designers and system administrators could be
encouraged to increase their skill set and sure up their
knowledge of Java, Oracle, Solaris and J2EE
technologies. "My aim is to push people to be their
best,” says Rick Hightower.
Rick stated, “The
career field that we have chosen is wrought with change.
In order to succeed, we need all eBlox people to have a
solid foundation of knowledge in the technology and
process that we use to build software."
Realizing this, Rick in conjunction with other
members of the team set up an incentive package to
encourage employees to strive for more knowledge and to
reach for advance career goals.
The plan
includes paying for books and tests so that our
employees can get certified in the technologies and
methodologies that eBlox uses. In addition, eBlox is
setting up a company library and reading room where
eBlox people can study after hours or during breaks. The
library will have books and CBTs. Employees can earn
points, which they can use to purchase additional
training.
eBlox Certifications
Certifications
Below are the the
certifications that Rick has obtained.
 rick@eblox.com
Office: 512-615-9345 x.103
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