- I am a motivated, passionate tech professional with strong organizational and communications skills — a lifelong geek who's also a people person.
- Since leaving corporate life in 2008, I've been taking time for myself — building skillsets professional and otherwise, freelancing, enjoying some long-delayed travel. It has been time well spent, but I am eager to be part of a team again, working on the sort of larger-scale projects that only a talented group can tackle. So I am seeking fulltime Web development work in a healthy environment with cool people.
- The picture at right shows me in a very happy moment. I want to feel that same way when I'm at "work." I know from personal experience this is possible!
- My professional background in is publishing and journalism, followed by eight years on the site development team at PC World.
- I speak fluent (X)HTML(5), CSS, JavaScript, Python, SQL, PHP, Perl, and Java. In pursuing freelance Web development work, I have become a user and big fan of Drupal.
- I'm well versed in contemporary Web standards, and also the best practices, tools, and processes for modern Web development and software engineering in general.
- For more about me, see Semblance. My work and education history follows.
Freelance Projects (late 2008 – present)
- alumni.berkeley.edu 2.1: A series of enhancements to the California Alumni Association's website, including significant improvements to the site's content creation pages, integration with Flickr, “extranet” functionality, and dozens of bug fixes.
- Wonderworker Press is the online home of a local artist. Drupal powers this site's online sales, HTML5-based rich media delivery, and dozens of art and writing exhibits.
- ncncucc.org: Where more than 125 UCC churches come together online. The site features postings from member churches, online registration and payment for events and camps, a "Find a Church" function with ZIP code proximity searching, an events calendar, and donations processing. The import of nearly 10 years of handcrafted HTML pages from an earlier site was also necessary. (Site built using Drupal.)
- I built The Martinez News-Gazette its first full online home. The site includes a Classified Ads section driven by a custom Drupal module that makes sense of the output from a 15+ year-old FoxPro system the Gazette still uses to manage Classifieds.
- Mad Props and The Sunday Morning Reader are two personal projects I built using Drupal.
- I performed code QA and technical edits for the following Peachpit Press titles:
- ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book
- ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash Professional CS5 Classroom in a Book
- Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5 Classroom in a Book
- Flash Professional CS5 Advanced for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickPro Guide
- Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium Classroom in a Book
- Not everything I build is for the Web: I also crafted and maintain Devidify, a simple tool for ripping audio tracks from DVDs on a Linux desktop.
PC World Communications, Inc. (1998 – 2008)
Quality Assurance Engineer
August 2006 – April 2008
- Handled all functional testing for PCWorld.com and Macworld.com. Designed and coded a suite of smoke tests for use against new builds of each site.
- Triaged and assigned to developers all incoming trouble tickets (bugs, feature requests, etc.) from colleagues in other departments as well as external partners; maintained familiarity with entire code base; coded fixes for many bugs myself.
- Ensured site compatibility across all popular browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE, mobile browsers) and platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix, mobile devices).
- Handled all application building (Apache Ant), release management, and deployment chores, including producing daily testing, staging, and production builds of both sites.
- Installed, customized, and administrated the development group's instance of Trac for bug ticketing, documentation, and Subversion source code repository browsing.
- Helped colleagues in other departments (Business Development, Audience Development, Ad Operations, Circulation, Production, Editorial, Design) to understand the site’s behavior, report bugs, define specs, and make feature requests.
- Assisted MIS team in server maintenance and troubleshooting, and attended to various codebase cleanup projects.
Technical Project Manager |
Senior Application Development Manager |
- Acted as project manager for two complete rewrites of PCWorld.com (2000 and 2006). Determined project sequence and timeline, collected assets and answers from internal departments and external partners, held architecture meetings, effectively encouraged developers to communicate clearly with each other. Performed similar work with projects large and small in the years between rebuilds.
- Acted as conduit between our development team and the designers at HotStudio (2000 redesign) and MetaDesign (2006 redesign).
- Designed a browser-based user interface for our home-brewed content-management system, in consultation with the editorial team. Defined tags for our custom XML markup. Received World Class Work award for print/online integration efforts.
- Worked directly with colleagues in other departments to produce and refine specs for their online initiatives and projects and wrote formal spec documents when appropriate).
Associate Editor |
Senior Associate Editor |
- Oversaw the Here’s How section of PCWorld.com; wrote or commissioned and edited how-to articles (roughly 3,000 words) and collections of shorter computer tips. Met weekly deadlines consistently.
- Scheduled content lineups on site index pages and adjusted stories during the day according to popularity.
- Covered various product beats; attended trade shows and hosted vendor demos at PC World headquarters.
Columnist & Writer
December 1998 – April 2008
- Wrote “Free Agent,” PC World’s only regular column on Free and Open Source software.
- Authored numerous product reviews, news stories, and interviews, as well as the first feature article on Linux to appear in the print version of PC World (April 2000).
CNET Networks, Inc.
Editorial Assistant, Builder.com
April 1998 – June 1998
- Shared in copyediting duties, participated in story development and scheduling, and maintained the editorial calendar.
- Crafted Builder.com’s weekly email newsletter, the Builder Blast.
Associate Producer, Software Download Services
August 1997 – May 1998
- Scouted for, evaluated, and reviewed online software offerings for inclusion in the software library on ActiveX.com, and in the Development Tools and Java areas on Download.com.
- Authored the ActiveX Dispatch, a weekly newsletter for ActiveX developers, and wrote reviews of selected software titles for Download.com’s weekly newsletter.