Put on your Thinking Cap!: Adam Liss: Who Is This Guy, and Why Is He Telling Me Stuff?

Who Am I?

I'm a hands-on, enthusiastic team lead and mentor who focuses on communication, compassion, best practices, and leadership by example. With electrical engineering degrees from Rutgers and Carnegie Mellon, I've designed, built, documented, and supported products ranging from cybersecurity appliances to entire testing labs to countless development tools for both software and hardware. My natural habitat is at the intersection of technology, empathy, and humor. I've always wanted to know how things work, whether they're machines, processes, or people. I'm a lifelong klutz, and although I will forever be 12 years old in my head, I no longer bounce when I fall.

Passions

Leading teams and individuals to succeed and grow through collaboration, mentorship, conflict resolution, problem solving, and compassion.
Teaching complex and traditionally difficult subjects through analogy, examples, insight into stumbling blocks, and humor.
Creating tools that “just work” simply, intuitively, and reliably, especially ones that hide complexity and toil from the humans who use them.
Preventing emergencies rather than mitigating them, making new mistakes, and handling "et cetera" — tasks that others avoid due to their high degree of risk, complexity, or difficulty.
Puzzles of all kinds, word games, cryptography, language, puns, dad jokes, and chocolate.

Non-Technical Accomplishments

Mentor to 8+ Googlers. Host/Mentor to 8+ Interns.
Improved the vetting/training processes for potential intern hosts at Google to ensure a positive, successful experience.
Hundreds of interviews & practice interviews: Computer Science Summer Institute, Google Champions, Google CodeU, Google intern program, Google recruiting, Google University Outreach, New Women New Yorkers.
Editor and Contributor to Google's "Testing on the Toilet," "Learning on the Loo," and "Weekly Doc Tips" publications.
Proposed and led several business-writing workshops; multiple peer bonuses for editing dozens of Googlers' documents.
Reviewed hundreds of candidates' resumes. Collaborated with dozens of students and job seekers to improve their resumes.
Hired technical writers, senior-level engineers, QA managers, and the best tech-support lead I've ever worked with.
Found a typo in the art on our conference room wall.

Technical Accomplishments

Led 5 developers and 10 consultants to build the first over-the-air-programmable wireless ecosystem. Our flagship product provided real-time stock quotes to Wall Street traders on a fail-safe OS-independent platform.
Built a family of cybersecurity appliances that provide connectivity to mission-critical equipment via Ethernet, modem, RS-232, and contact closures. They ensure secure remote access with multiple authentication mechanisms. Features include automated alarm management, a multitasking scripting engine, and a configurable firewall with double NAT.
Designed and built the security firmware for a third-party modem, providing secure remote access, alarming, multi-factor authentication, and tamper-proof logs. My API design was critical because the hardware vendor refused to give us access to their source code. They'd modify their portion of the firmware, I'd send them my changes, they'd build and send me the binary, and I'd install and test it, da capo al successo. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a bug filed against the firmware.

Shepherded our SA5600 secure appliance through the Joint Interoperabiilty Test Command verification process, making it the first product on the US Department of Defense "Unified Capabilities Approved Product List" (US DoD UC-APL). At that point, it became the only device that was approved for use on any DoD network. All of the extant non-compliant equipment—from routers to photocopiers—instantly became compliant when our SA5600 was inserted between them and the network jack they were connected to.

Led a team of developers to build a KVM switch that connects either of 2 users to any of 32 computers. After working unsuccessfully for an entire year under my predecessor, the team agreed to start from scratch with me. I taught them best practices, introduced source control and defect tracking, and enabled them to bring the product to market, all within 4 months.

Updated a hardware lab that verifies media playback on consumer set-top devices. Added equipment and built software that automated all testing as well as recovery from failures, reducing on-site maintenance from several incidents per week to virtually 0. Created a bill of materials, documented the configuration process, and remotely led teams to replicate the lab in 2 locations across the country.
Rewrote a device-independent automated testing platform that executed hundreds of tests daily on Android and iOS systems. Once in place, the system operated without intervention until it was deprecated 3 years later.
Automated the failover of the Google-wide build system upon data center outages.