Clifford Heath is a professional innovator specialising in Agile Information Management and Design. Since leaving his position as Principal Engineer at ManageSoft Ltd (where he is a founder and former director), Clifford has been engaged as a specialist consultant with a focus on development of enterprise Web applications using Ruby on Rails, and is vigorously pursuing a personal research project called ActiveFacts, which promises to radically transform the design and implementation of business information systems.
He has 26 years of industry experience covering roles as architect and team leader for three major software products for ManageSoft (formerly Open Software Associates) and Hewlett-Packard. He holds three patents (US and Australia) and is a key innovator, producing a constant source of ideas to meet emerging industry needs and solve current problems. His colleagues have always looked to him to take the lead in formulating a
pragmatic approach to new problems.
Clifford is a toolmaker by motivation, believing that project lifecycles can often be shortened by applying the right software tools. He designed and built much of the common code infrastructure used by the ManageSoft team, including Unicode international APIs, XML processors, multi- lingual support, system event monitoring and networking (TCP, HTTP, FTP). He dabbles in electronics and has designed and built microprocessor systems for musical instruments, acoustic position detection using sonar, robotics, and electronic sports timing. He has also built a number of rockets, several guitars, a variety of wood-turnings, and assorted machinery. He created and operates a popular model rocket simulation on the Internet, widely used to improve rocket designs. Clifford has a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) from the University of Melbourne, 1980.
