About
In June 2022, Alan joined New Harbor Capital, as Partner of the Portfolio Operations Group, heading up the IT area, 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, that recently turned into an investment group. Alan served as CTO for a number of 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 full time CTO at Royall & Company where 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.
Publications
Alan has published a number of books in the Java space covering Enterprise Java, Servlets, JavaMail and database access. He also served in the role of Editor-in-Chief for Java Developers Journal, one of the largest magazines in the space with a 200k monthly circulation.
May 2023, his latest book, “Think like a CTO“ aimed at the new or maturing CTO’s of small to medium-size business was published by Manning Publications.
University Lecturing
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
Speaking Engagement
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 recently spoke at the jChampions Conference 2022, on Serverless.
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 installations.
In later years, all 600K lines of code was released under a GPL open source licence and gained a new lease of life driven by the community.
Alan Williamson 