Tim Burks

In the summer of 2014, ZipRealty was acquired by Realogy, the parent company of over a quarter of a million agents working with many well known brokerage brands including Century 21, ERA, Coldwell Banker, and Sotheby's. I was involved with the ZipRealty Real Estate iOS apps when they were first created in 2009, and continued for many years as a part-time member of the mobile team assisting with architecture and new technology.

I helped people create iPhone and iPad apps by working as a developer, by providing one-on-one problem solving and advice, and by organizing and managing teams of developers. I also organized the Silicon Valley iOS Developers' Meetup Group, a monthly networking and information-sharing event that I started in March 2008. http://meetup.com/sviphone One of my larger app projects was the ZipRealty app for iPhone and iPad. Beginning in the fall of 2009, I consulted with ZipRealty to help get their initial iPhone app into the App Store, then added the Home Scan AR feature, and then created the first version of ZipRealty for iPad in time for the iPad launch (which we achieved at the same time I was preparing MobileIron Sentry for the iPad launch). Later I brought John Ellenich into ZipRealty for an extensive new design for the iPad app and I have continued to work with ZipRealty to support new features and quality improvements. For more on ZipRealty for iPhone and iPad, see http://www.ziprealty.com/iphone and http://www.ziprealty.com/ipad. In the winter of 2011, I worked with filmmaker Marc Smolowitz to create an iPad app that promoted organ transplant awareness. Called "The Daily Gift", the app was an "advent calendar" for April 2011, National Donate Life Month, and featured video testimonials from people whose lives have been touched by organ transplant: recipients, donor families, living donors, and caregivers. The app also included clips and background information from "The Power of Two", a highly-acclaimed film about our friends Isabel and Ana Stenzel, twin sisters who received life-saving lung transplants as their lungs were failing from Cystic Fibrosis.

CloudCar was a Los Altos and Mountain View-based startup building software and apps to make driving safer and more fun. In September 2014, I joined the CloudCar team as an advisor, problem solver, and software developer and spent just over a year helping them through major staff and technical transitions that included replacing a Javascript and HTML-based hybrid app with a fully-native iOS app. In this I was primarily responsible for media services but also helped with architecture, memory management, navigation, and system integration.

Renaissance was a three-day conference for iOS app makers in San Francisco that featured a fast-paced track of sessions that focuses on success in the app business. Renaissance uniquely focused on developer interests because it was uniquely run by developers themselves. All of the conference organizers and moderators were career software developers with commitment both to apps and to community. I have organized the Silicon Valley iOS Developers' Meetup since 2008, and in 2010 and 2011, Renaissance cofounder Bill Dudney worked at Apple as an Application Frameworks Evangelist, where his duties included planning and coaching a large part of the sessions at Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference. Bill is now back at Apple, but throughout our careers, both of us have been involved in many individual projects and have consulted for companies ranging from two-person startups to multibillion-dollar multinationals. * Watch our Renaissance '14 "Ethics for App Makers" session with Santa Clara University professor Shannon Vallor http://youtu.be/-o0gX0W9Q1g

As the first (and for over a year the only) iOS-related member of the MobileIron team, I helped MobileIron adapt its original plans for managing Windows Mobile-based phones to the iPhone. I wrote the first MobileIron native iPhone client app and helped build the configuration management system that grew from that. Later I worked with Tom Wagner and John Ellenich to build MobileIron Sentry, the first IT app for the iPad. Following this, I continued to work part-time with MobileIron to provide advance development of new features including document distribution, user-specific configuration distribution, and several to-be-released product features.

In late 2002, I followed Kevin Steptoe as VP of Product Engineering at Magma. I believe I was the fourth person in the company to take this position, and I was the first software developer to fill it. As we grew, Magma struggled to keep a rapidly-expanding base of customers productively using software that had also been built quite rapidly. Magma's Product Engineering team was intended to work between Magma's field application engineers and developers, providing support for both by improving and focusing communication and testing. Because it had been staffed with Magma's application engineers, it originally had a strong problem-solving focus, and often acted more as a backup FAE organization than the support that I was hoping to work with as a developer. During my tenure, Magma's product engineering team became responsible for documentation, expanded its training efforts, and worked to improve the quality of bug reports that FAEs entered into the system.

I was employee #14 at Magma, and I built the original static timing analyzer for Magma's constraint-driven design system. At the time I joined Magma, I was offered an identical position at competing Monterey Design Systems. I chose Magma because I was impressed by the hands-on work ethic and focus of everyone that I met on the Magma team. In my first few years at Magma, I was directly responsible for the static timing analysis component of Magma's fully-integrated RTL-to-GDSII digital design system. It was used by all parts of the system, and as Magma's early emphasis on logical effort-based design gradually transformed into more iterative approaches, our incremental static timer came under heavy pressure. Fortunately after a few years, Bob Swanson, Roger Embree, Alex Spencer, and Manjit Borah came to Magma and took over parts of the system. I continued to work as a hands-on developer and manager of the timing analysis team until September 2002.

This was my first job after graduate school. Before I interviewed, I remember thinking "this group has accomplished so much already, what can I contribute?" But I quickly learned that the Somerset CAD group was facing two challenges where I could help: 1) correct (non-pessimistic) timing analysis of circuits with transparent latches, and 2) device-level electrical and timing analysis. I had worked on the first topic at Michigan, and I was naive enough to take on the second at Somerset (everyone who knew better had said "we can't do that"). This work turned into a complete rewrite of the Somerset Timing Evaluation Program (which we called STEP3), involved several other developers, and was extended to have device-level timing analysis capabilities. Unlike existing tools, STEP3's device-level timing analysis was based on fast circuit simulation, and for this we used Anirudh Devgan's ACES tool. The API that Anirudh created for me to use in STEP3 was later used by the Einstimer TLT (Transistor Level Timing) project. But the highlight of this time was working with many great software developers including John Davis, Shervin Hojat, Rob Mains, Bob Swanson, Joe Hutt, Derek Beatty, Stephen Lim, and Phil Barker.