Welcome to my online resume.
First, let's dispense with the usual third party resume nonsense. Since the whole point of doing my resume in this way is to provide an example of what I can do on the web, it would be pretty silly to use the usual stuffy third person form for the text here...pretending to have written the software that drives this site but not the text that lives here. Let's face it, nearly everyone writes their own resume -- they should be written in the first person.
Good, now that we have that nonsense out of the way, let me get you oriented. You've landed on a Ruby On Rails with Ajax site that I wrote specifically to showcase some of my talents in that area and at the same time give you a few different ways to get to know me. Since an online resume doesn't really lend itself to the use of databases and fancy plug-ins or even "Edge Rails", don't expect to be overly wowed by the skill level required. If you can think of something more exciting to do with Rails on a site like this, I would love to hear about it.
The popup menu in the upper left is just for fun. It changes the CSS (stylesheets) used by the site and makes it all look very different, without actually affecting the code or the content of the site. The "Conservative" selection is just a no-nonsense "I came here to read about your experience" format. The rest are sort of a walk down memory lane to see how "state of the art" Web design has changed over the years.
A bit further down you will find a set of "tabs" that take you to different types of content and help you get to know me in different ways.
That's it in a nutshell. Go ahead and explore the site and the places it links to. I hope to hear from you soon.
First, the "Reader's Digest version":
I'm a degreed Electrical Engineer turned programmer (15 years ago), and an avid nature photographer. After more than 15 years of watching my expertise (embedded C programming) fade away into the past Millennium, I recently chose to "jump ahead", and start a new career writing Web related software and specializing in what is likely to become the new Gold Standard in web programming -- Ruby On Rails.
I may be a very geeky artist, or perhaps just a somewhat artistic geek. I can see it going either way and have no real preference for one or the other. My two favorite things to do in life, in no particular order, are creating things that I find esthetic, and solving "geeky problems". The problem with the artistic half is that I can't draw or paint or sing, so for the first few years of my life I was just a frustrated artist. When I picked up a real camera for the first time and discovered that I have "an eye for photography", that frustration came to an end. While I enjoyed photography as my only enduring hobby for a good many years, it always seemed like there was too much about it that I didn't like. In particular, having to wait several days to see "what I got", and the whole darkroom nonsense, which never appealed to me.
Happily, around the start of the new Millenium, digital photography first moved into a quality level that made it applicable to professional and artistic photography. Since that time, my photography has dovetailed with my computer skills to bring about a real renaissance in this once flagging hobby. You can view some of my nature photography on my
JeffPritchard.com site.
In an effort to keep this page on the theme of a "bio" rather than just a resume in a different form, let me round out my self-description with the following miscellaneous information:
- I make my homes (both of them) in sunny San Diego California, USA
- In addition to my "condo in town", I also own some land in the local mountains
- I like to spend weekends "playing in the dirt" with my Bobcat tractor at my mountain retreat
- I'm a new car addict - I've owned about twenty cars in the thirty years I've been driving
- My goal is to build a house on my land and do Web development full time, telecommuting from there.
- I love to work -- I hate looking for work; a strong incentive to keep my clients happy
This contact info is provided as an image to prevent the Web Scrapers from scavenging it...
This section will give you as much or as little information as you might like on the types of work I've done over the years. The most salient points are these...
- I have built two major Rails apps and several other HTML/CSS websites - with about 2 years of Rails experience, I'm a "Rails Expert".
- The rest of my 20+ years of experience is relevant only as "seasoning", and does not pertain to my new career as a Web Application developer.
- I'm an old dog, but no stranger to learning new tricks.
- By now, I've done enough Web development of different kinds to be established in my new career as a Web Developer.
- With about three years of Web development following a 20 year career, I am a very experienced and stable engineer/developer.
- Despite the above, I love to work and hate looking for work, so my rates are on the low end of the Web developer spectrum.
What follows is a condensed version of my resume, with the things most relevant to Web development at the beginning. It plays fast and loose with the time-stream, but provides a realistic overview of what I bring to the table as a Web developer and a Software Engineer. You may find it somewhat guilty of "name dropping", but I feel that adds some flavor and makes some of it easier to relate to and put in perspective. Think of it as a stream of consciousness explanation of what I've done over the years, somewhat like what you might hear from me in an interview. It starts now and works its way back into the mists of antiquity...
- I designed, developed, debugged, and took to market a major Rails App called Rrankk.com
- I built this simple resume site using basic Ruby on Rails and Ajax and CSS techniques
- I wrote a major "E-bay for answers" type Rails with Ajax site for a startup company
- I learned to use Ruby, Rails, Ajax, Subversion, and Capistrano in my spare time
- I created a Ruby script that lets me add text pages to my sites by just sending an email
- I created a couple of large (75 pages) HTML "infopreneur" sites to learn more about Web development
- I have my own Unix Virtual Dedicated Server at an ISP which I manage myself
- I wrote a neat javascript main page for my photography site
- I led a team of twelve Software Engineers in developing the worlds first PalmOS Smartphones
- I did PalmOS contract software work for several clients including Proctor and Gamble and U.C. Irvine
- I wrote much of what Palm still uses today as their Macintosh desktop software
- I wrote an award winning disk utility called HSM Toolkit for Macintosh
- I spend several years doing Agile Macintosh Development before anybody had a name for it
- I wrote a top-selling Macintosh troubleshooting and benchmarking product called "Snooper"
- I developed both the hardware and software for a multi-CPU workstation for animation professionals
- I worked on a team that developed a training system for F15-E Aircraft maintenance personnel
- I led the team that developed the firmware for the worlds first professional digital camera (Kodak)
- I got a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering at University of Missouri - Rolla
- I survived High School as a tall skinny nerd with glasses and braces
This online resume is a work in progress. When I started it, it stood alone as an example (or proof, if you will) of my ability to do Ruby on Rails Web development. The plan is to improve it over time, primarily by providing links to many other Web related works of mine.
Now that I actually have other Ruby on Rails works that I can direct you to, this page has become much more impressive. No longer must I say "you're looking at it" when it comes to displaying my wares. My first major Rails success is now deployed. That site's owner and I are continuing to tweak things as we learn more about how our users want to use the site. It is, after all, Agile Web Development with Rails. The site is all about letting users set up fun and interesting ranking polls that anyone can vote on. I welcome you to go to Rrankk.com and have a look around. The site was done over the course of a few months by just myself and one other part-time developer. All of the UI work is mine. While I learned some things watching the other guy do the database work on this site, I'm quite comfortable doing that work as well. This was a fun project, and I feel that it warrants my feeling that I have "graduated" to the realm of a full-fledged Rails developer. This was my second major Rails development, and the first to actually make its way to the public.
Alas, my first major Rails app had the carpet yanked out from under its feet just short of completion. Since the startup company that funded that effort was unable to further capitalize it, it is not deployed in any public forum, so I cannot point you to it as an example of an in-use popular app of my creation. That app consists of 9 controllers, 2 complex models, and 6 very heavily ajax'ed views which would, if one took into account all of the content that gets slid into and out of view, amount to more like twenty pages.
The next Rails app to appear here will be a gift to the Rails community. I'm planning to build and host a wiki of sorts that will hold examples of common code snippets from Rails apps. A repository of Rails example code if you will.
Outside of the Ruby on Rails arena, there are a few other sites I can point to that show I didn't just hop off the turnip truck when it comes to the Web. These are sites that I built myself and most of which I host on my virtual dedicated unix server (I have yet to move my photography site over).
My Nature Photography Site (JeffPritchard.com) This site has been around the longest, and was originally just created to showcase my photography hobby for friends and family. One of the first efforts I made at getting into Web development was to learn a little bit of javascript. The main page of this site is evidence of that, while the remainder of the site was just created long ago with a gallery creation software package. While this endeavor helped me to stick my toe in the icy water of Web development, I consider it's primary usefulness to have been the proof it provided to me that fancy websites should be done "server side", with as little javascript as possible. Getting this one page to behave in a similar fashion on just three different browsers was an exercise in frustration...hence my immediate and successful lateral arabesque into the world of Ruby on Rails.
My Credit Cards and Loans Site This site was built using an online business development site called SBI, but has since been moved over to my own hosting. This site consists of roughly 75 well optimized pages and contributes nicely to my "hosting fund" via Google Adsense income. This site needs to grow quite a bit before it gets "the big traffic".
My Political Rant Site (URL withheld to protect the guilty). This site is full of mostly political satire and humor. When I get really ticked off about something I find it therapeutic to write about it. Because of the extreme views I hold on some issues (imagine if Lou Dobbs swallowed Ayn Rand and Lewis Black), I've chosen to withhold the URL for this one at this time. If you can either convince me you have a similar outlook on life, or convince me my political views will not influence your decision to hire me, I'll hand over the URL. An interesting programmatic aside to this basic HTML site is that I've written and hosted an interesting server-side Ruby script that allows me to add pages to this site simply by sending an email to a special email address on my server. No need to mess with HTML or SSH'ing the file around and adding a link to the new rant. Just type up an email and hit send and the script does all of the plebeian nonsense for me.