About

Alan Williamson

Alan heads up Engineering at HiBid Auctions, as Chief Technology Officer, marshalling in a complete reimagination of a platform that is second behind eBay in the world of auctions.

June 2022, Alan joined New Harbor Capital, as Partner of the Portfolio Operations Group, heading up the TechOps, servicing New Harbor’s growing family of portfolio investments, serving as CTO for a number of investments, evolving engineering teams, from across the globe.

Prior to that he was a founding Partner and Chief Technology Officer of MacLaurin Group, an outsource operating partner for private equity and investment companies. Alan served as CTO for clients, creating and growing teams.

Alan supported portfolio company operations, providing interim-CTO duties for ParkerGale Capital, a Chicago based private equity company. Prior to joining ParkerGale, Alan served as their CTO for Royall & Company which he was responsible for the architecture, development and maintenance of all systems to support the needs and requirements of clients.

With a deep background in high-volume server processing, Alan was the first U.K. Java Champion, a program by Oracle/Sun to recognize the Top 100 people who have contributed the most to Java. Alan graduated from the University of Paisley, Scotland, in the early 1990’s with a Hons BSc. degree in Computer Science with Digital Control.

Speaking

Alan was an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University where he designed, delivered, mentored and examined the course for a class of 60 students – Object Design and Algorithms. He also taught an MBA class, on Cloud Computing, at University of Richmond in the summer.

Alan has spoken at over 30 conferences, all over the globe, on topics ranging from deep Java technical sessions, open source licensing, big data, cloud techniques and most recently IoT. He has spoken at the jChampions Conference, on Serverless.

Alan has appeared on a number of podcasts, including AWS, Private Equity Funcast, HockeyStick, University of Paisley, Rob Liddiard, Techlead Journal.

Open Source

Alan has contributed code and patches for many open source projects over the years, including; JQuery, Apache Commons, Mongo Java driver, Jetty, JavaMail and the core Java SDK.

Alan was the core architect behind BlueDragon/OpenBD – a Java JEE engine that supports and renders the Allaire/Adobe CFML web scripting language. Built from the ground up, BlueDragon went onto power the 5th largest website in the world and the largest CFML website – MySpace.com.

The project was later ported to run on Microsoft’s .NET platform, offering the only .NET implementation for CFML and powering many US State Government sites. In later years, code was released under a GPL open source license.