Rob Heittman is a system architect, software developer and veteran small business executive.  He has overall responsibility for Solertium's proprietary software, and manages both internal and contract software development operations.  In addition, he is the principal technical liaison between Solertium and the open source community, and coordinates Solertium's strategic application of Google technologies.

Rob has served as directing consultant, technical lead, or sole developer on major custom software projects for non-profit enterprises, educational institutions, and U.S. government agencies.

In this capacity, he has scoped, architected and engineered over a dozen large-scale business intelligence and collaboration systems, including the Species Information Service Toolkit that drives IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species, and Conservation International's Grant Enterprise Management system.  Collectively, these diverse systems represent several million dollars' worth of successful long-term software project investment.

Rob is a long-term fixture in the open source community, and has been releasing open source applications since 1992. He was an active participant in open source projects powering the early commercial Internet, such as Apache/SSL, Perl and FastCGI. Currently he leads the GoGoEgo project to produce an efficient, resource-based content management and e-commerce platform, and is working with the Restlet project to create a new Java web application framework that correctly reflects and leverages the architecture of the World Wide Web. He is consistently ranked in the top tier of open source developers by Ohloh.com.

As Managing Partner of Cluestream Ventures, LLC, a position he has held since 2001, Rob continues to work with small business and startup ventures to launch innovative, technology-focused business ideas.  In this role, he travels worldwide to perform due diligence and technology strategy consulting, and gains early exposure to tomorrow's breakthrough technologies. He is introducing cloud computing and platform independence to new products in the point-of-sale, online gaming, and health education sectors.

Rob's previous software venture, Worldweb.net, grew to employ over 200 worldwide staff, built an impressive global customer list and was acquired by Starbase Corporation for $26 million in 2000. As a co-founder and Vice President of Worldweb.net, Rob served in diverse roles: building the first commercial Internet Service Provider network to offer only modern-style direct Internet connections; managing the production of over 200 large web sites including USNews.com and InstitutionalInvestor.com; creating a highly profitable alliance partner sales program; and evangelizing the company's software products to analysts and press.  In 1995, Rob authored Pressroom, one of the first browser-based web content management products.

Before the Internet revolution, Rob developed client-server database systems for the Department of Information Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia, and consulted for private firms in the publication and property management sectors.  His first software consulting paycheck came at age 14, when he was contracted to design and develop animated graphics for an Apple typing tutor program.

Rob attended George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, where he studied English Composition and Public Administration.

Rob's Twitter Feed

Rob's Links

Brian Mastenbrook: How I cross-site scripted Twitter in 15 minutes ...
Sat, 05 Sep 2009
A unicode vulnerability that's pretty ingenious, and some good advice for framework and application vendors.

The Amazing Blog : Your Web Service Might Not Be RESTful If...
Mon, 27 Jul 2009
Required reading, and don't miss William Pietri's awesome comment!

Andrew Niefer: Using the deltapack in Eclipse 3.5
Wed, 08 Jul 2009
Thanks for the new secret handshake, Andrew!

Short and Sweet: Automatic Volume Snapshots using Amazon EC2 and EBS
Tue, 30 Jun 2009
Simple howto for automating snapshots from each EC2 instance.

AppArmor, one more place to check for permission blocks
Tue, 30 Jun 2009
When chown -R bind:bind $1 && chmod u+w $1 is not enough.