Brendan Avery Baldwin
Mission Objective
- Seek out and join forces with other real, ultimate, agile code ninjas and wiley web wizards to form Web 2.1 Voltron, with monetization plan
- Deliver devastatingly elegant Ruby, JavaScript, and XHTML/CSS scripting attacks with lazer-focused intensity
- Generate bleeding-edge dynamic web products to usher in a golden age of total planetary happiness
Use the left and right arrows to move ninja side to side. Use up arrow to jump. Now you have real ultimate power!
Summary Of Qualifications
- 13 years of professional software development experience, with 24 years of total programming experience
- Writes code for fun as well as for profit
- Has been doing "AJAX" since Netscape 3 when it meant serializing data in cookies using javascript Image objects to pipe asynchronous requests. (Ask me how!)
Weapons of Choice
- Ruby for mixins, method_missing, &to_proc, and the eigenclass
- Rails for migrations, routes.rb, respond_to, NewRelic RPM, and the network effect
- Rack for out-merbing Merb for fast and simple HTTP services
- RSpec for pushing the TDD envelope towards BDD, and for excellent mock/stub frameworks
- JavaScript for jQuery, Prototype.js, [], {}, JSON, and being ubiquitous
- CSS for descendant selectors and enabling spritemaps with background-position
- Nginx for the best web-server config format, predictable and performant behavior, and for beautifully low memory footprint. Throw in built-in proxy/balancing, SMTP?, and I'm loving being a webdeveloper again.
- XHTML for XML + XSLT, and the DOM
- HAML for making XHTML fun to look at like Ruby but formal like Python
- Mac OS X for Quicksilver, FreeBSD, and the Reality Distortion Field™
- Linux for iptables, keeping text files alive, and for compiling from source. Most familiar with Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS
- Firefox for Firebug/YSlow
- TextMate for Command+T, and having Bundles for everything
- Vim for saving my wrists from repetitive mouse strain and always being there when I need it
- Git for offline commits, distributed development, and of github!
- Subversion for keeping iterations tight
- MySQL for simplicity, flexibility, (MySQL Proxy (Lua!), and because it still continues to surprise me
- SQL for those times when the ORM needs more juice
- Photoshop for gradient-fills, rounded corners, drop-shadows, and glossy reflections
- Capistrano for the remote scripting equivalent of a sorceror’s apprentice
- Markdown because it could just as well be plain-text where Textile is the worst of both worlds
Backup Super-Powers
- Apache HTTPD for mod_rewrite, .htaccess, reliability, and a mod_ for pretty much everything (Phusion Passenger FTW)
- PHP for the __set() and __get() magic methods, stupid-easy deployment (but its so ugly— srsly!)
- ColdFusion for allowing function Struct(){return arguments}, Ben Forta’s beard, and for being the first to bring RAD to the web
- ASP for supporting Server-Side JavaScript
- Visual Basic for partying like its 1995
- Windows for Cygwin ;P
- Oracle 10g for recursive PL/SQL
- SQL Server for being prettier than Oracle
- CVS for being better than ClearCase
- ClearCase for being better than Visual SourceSafe
- Visual SourceSafe for being better than nothing
- Flash for ActionScript, tweening, and automatic polygonal collision detection
Pattern Fluency/Techniques
- OOP (Object-Oriented Programming)
- BDD (Behavior-Driven Development)
- TDD (Test-Driven Development)
- FBP (Flow-Based Programming)
- MVC (Model-View-Controller)
- AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming)
- Declarative over Imperative Programming
- DRY Programming
- Functional Programming
- Unobtrusive Scripting
- DOM Event-Delgation
Experience
- April 2009 to Present
- Privately Held; ~40 employees; Gaming industry
- Design and development for Playdom.com and inter-game trading and community features. Lots of JavaScript/jQuery and PHP (using phpspec for BDD) and introduced Cucumber+Selenium+Webrat to drive application design and acceptance testing.
Chief Internet Architect @ Qik (http://qik.com)
- May 2008 to April 2009 (11 months)
- Privately Held; ~30 employees; Internet industry
- Driving development efforts and strategy for web applications architecture at Qik.com. Developed and implemented web, application and database service clusters using Nginx, HAProxy, MySQL Proxy/Lua, Memcached, Sphinx and Rails. Customized and deployed Skynet mqueue/map-reduce to process tasks asynchronously. Managing the conversion from single-environment first-gen architecture to distributed SOA, and implementing a fully RESTful API supporting ActiveResource and oAuth. Working with a team of top engineers, designers, and business mavens around the world.
- January 2007 to May 2008 (1 year 5 months)
- Privately Held; ~10 employees; Internet industry
- Architecting and developing a social-networking and action-organization application written from the ground-up in Rails. Lots of work on Rails internals and plugins development. Working with a small agile team of 5 other coders. Continuous integration and testing using RSpec, Selenium, and CruiseControl.rb. ECommerce integration using ActiveMerchant.
- July 2006 to January 2007 (7 months)
- Public Company; 51-200 employees; Financial Services industry
- Ruby on Rails developer with special emphasis on Front-end/AJAX/HTML/CSS goodness. It’s my goal to optimize the user experience of our website and backend applications as well as build tools and libraries for the team as a whole.
- August 2005 to May 2006 (10 months)
- Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Financial Services industry
- Worked on the FitchRatings.com website and internal ColdFusion applications. Lots of work with XML/XSLT, ColdFusion, and some Java. Tons of Javascript and CSS, and did some training/presentations on web-standards, scripting, and library architecture.
Software Development Consultant @ Imagination Publishing (http://www.imaginepub.com)
- 2005 to 2006 (1 year)
- Information Technology and Services industry
Senior Web Consultant @ Citadel Investment Group, L.L.C. (http://www.citadelgroup.com)
- April 2004 to July 2005 (1 year 4 months)
- Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Capital Markets industry
- Web Applications Architect/Consultant. Built ColdFusion recruiting and HR applications with SQL Server back-end. Lots of integration with Peoplesoft and there was some PHP work too. I did quite a bit of DHTML in this position and honed my ninja skills in terms of front-end DOM manipulation and AJAXian coding.
- November 1998 to November 2003 (5 years 1 month)
- Public Company; 51-200 employees; RNK; Motion Pictures and Film industry
- Designed, developed, and maintained several B2B and public/consumer websites aimed at promoting motion picture and television properties. This included creating online storefronts for merchandise, metadata-rich asset-management systems for the studios to manage related materials, and a variety of support systems. This was done using technologies such as PHP, ColdFusion, JSP, ASP, Flash, Javascript, SQL-Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, WindowsNT, Apache, and IIS.
- September 1996 to November 1999 (3 years 3 months)
- Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Services industry
- Designed, developed, and maintained internal applications and public-facing web sites for recruiting operations and client services for a 10+ year old staffing company. Started with client-server Visual Basic and SQL Server, migrating to ASP, and finally ColdFusion for rapid development. Installed and managed a network of 20+ servers and workstations (Windows NT). Managed two IT employees, who performed additional development and network support tasks.
References furnished on request. Contact me at bb@brendanbaldwin.com. Please note that while the word “enterprise” no longer appears anywhere in this resume, this is entirely intentional. KTHX BYE!
