brenhill.net

Brendan Hill

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Sugar Land, TX · bren.hill@gmail.com

Principal Software Architect — WPF, .NET, and the slow art of migrating legacy systems without breaking customers.

I work alongside coding agents (Claude, primarily) on architecture, scaffolding, and the kind of refactor sweeps that benefit from a tireless second pair of eyes — but the design calls, the threat modelling, and the calls about what's worth shipping are mine.

Reach for: .NET 8/9 · WPF · C# · Azure DevOps · Astro · TypeScript

Experience

  1. Principal Software Architect · Dimensional Solutions, Inc.

    Jun 2014 – present

    Sugar Land, TX

    Lead architect on a multi-product migration from legacy Microsoft technologies to C# / .NET / WPF for the company's commercial civil-engineering software.

    • Drove the long-running migration from legacy Microsoft stacks to C# / .NET / WPF across the company’s commercial product line. Set the technology roadmap and the architectural patterns the team builds against today.
    • Architect and implement full-stack features for code-compliant foundation design, load back-calculation, and project material tracking — software used in production by civil engineers designing real structures.
    • Established the team’s agile process, code-review standards, Azure DevOps pipelines, and onboarding practice. [TBD: a defensible single metric — e.g. “Halved release-cycle time” or “Cut customer-reported regressions by N%”. Skip if no honest number exists.]
    • Lead and mentor the development team, including an offshore contingent. [TBD: replace with a concrete team-size statement, e.g. “Currently lead N engineers across two timezones.”]
    • Originally joined DSI as a developer in 1998–2000 (VB6 era) — wrote the civil-engineering and CAD-automation libraries the company still depends on. Returned in 2014 to lead the modernization of those products onto .NET.

    Stack: C#, .NET, WPF, MVVM, Prism, Azure DevOps, SQL Server, Excel interop.

  2. Sr. Software Engineer · Cardno PPI

    Nov 2008 – Jun 2014

    Lead UI design and implementation on a SaaS oil-and-gas quality-management product.

    • Led UI design and implementation for a cloud-based SaaS quality-management product serving oil-and-gas operations.
    • Shipped a dashboard + KPI system reporting on equipment failure rates by region, vendor, and time window.
    • Built the reusable custom UI controls the product depended on: a heterogeneous-data grid driven by LINQ-to-SQL expressions through AJAX, full-featured combo boxes designed around minimizing data transfer, and a guided wizard for complex equipment-inspection entry.
    • Designed a workflow system that captured customer-specific document processes against a single shared schema.
    • Improved page performance and bandwidth use by introducing view-model objects and targeted client-side caching on the controls and pages that needed it.
    • Coached junior engineers on DRY patterns and code-review practice.

    Stack: C#, .NET, ASP.NET WebForms, IIS, SQL Server, Telerik ASP.NET AJAX, Telerik ORM, jQuery, Knockout, SCSS / Compass, Foundation Grid.

  3. Software Engineer · Brocade Communications, Inc.

    Nov 2004 – Oct 2008

    First C# / WinForms engineer at Brocade; owned the rich-client UI framework that became the foundation of the company's UI overhaul.

    • First in the company to use C# and Windows Forms — designed the rich-client UI for Brocade MyView, a data-virtualization and file-access reporting tool whose UI became the basis of a complete overhaul across Brocade’s product line.
    • Co-designed a WinForms eventing / context-menu / command / selection-tracking framework on the MVC pattern. Other product teams adopted it to cut UI code duplication.
    • Took sole ownership of that client framework: new feature work, maintenance, developer education through brown-bags and recorded tutorials, and code review on framework usage across product teams.
    • Wrote the custom controls the framework needed — a multi-threaded multi-selectable tree view, a virtual list view, wizard-page infrastructure, and an Outlook-style navigation control.
    • Ported the legacy MFC UI and its custom controls onto the new WinForms / C# architecture.

    Stack: C#, .NET, Windows Forms, MFC interop, Sourcegear Vault, FogBugz, VMware, Microsoft DFS.

  4. Development Project Lead · BindView Development

    Apr 2000 – Sep 2004

    Led integrations and the deployment-libraries team for BindView's vulnerability-assessment and policy-compliance products.

    • Promoted to lead the integration of BindView’s vulnerability-assessment and policy-compliance products with Microsoft MOM and HP OpenView (C++, COM, Win32, SOAP). Coordinated across product, QA, dev, and docs to hit aggressive milestones.
    • Designed and shipped the automatic-update system that pulled Microsoft patches from the Internet for BindView’s patch-deployment product (C++, COM, DCOM, WinHTTP).
    • Rebuilt the remote-agent deployment system for the vulnerability-assessment product line, cutting deployment-related tech-support incidents by 50%.
    • Halved customer incident turn-around time by adding rigorous logging across the deployment code path.
    • Led the small team responsible for BindView’s software deployment libraries.
    • Flew to customer sites to debug, fix, and personally close critical support incidents.

    Stack: C++, MFC, COM / DCOM, Win32, Rational ClearCase / ClearQuest, VMware.

Education

  • B.S. Computer Science, Mathematics Minor · University of Houston

    Houston, TX