John Cunningham, Band XI International, LLC
John Cunningham began programming 25 years ago as an undergraduate in mechanical engineering with the goal of reducing the burden of repetitive manual data capture and statistical analysis for his labs. That experience led him to graduate work in modeling mechanical designs to account for manufacturability rules that could guide designer choices. At that point, he became enamored with the limitless potential to model real world systems and pursued a career in software, while maintaining an engineer?s perspective on systems construction using component models. This interest has led to a lifetime of learning about a variety of domains, from finance, banking, and insurance to gas, electric, and communications utilities and most recently to embedded systems for automotive, telematics, and military applications.
John is President of Band XI International, a small firm that builds complete system solutions that span from embedded controllers to web servers for such applications as fleet management and hazardous material detection. Band XI?s current projects employ Java and the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) using Eclipse and Equinox to build, deploy, and manage software for mobile, embedded computing. Band XI has adopted Ruby/Rails as the preferred platform for building the server side elements of systems.
He is also an advocate of agile and lean development methods who believes strongly that a manager?s primaries duties are to set project goals, facilitate communication, and remove obstacles from the path of a skilled and ambitious development team. He often consults on agile adoption by bridging the gap between the business and technical staff, facilitating story capture, agile planning, and assisting in the design of workable component architectures.
John has managed object-oriented projects for nearly 20 years, having worked at Andersen Consulting (Accenture), Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), Travelers Insurance (Citigroup), Object Technology International (OTI), and IBM. In 2005, he founded Band XI International to practice and refine best practices in agile component engineering for embedded systems. His background and experience is equally balanced between technical and managerial. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University (1986), a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1988), and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Connecticut (1995).
