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diff --git a/static/media/css/grimoire.css b/static/media/css/grimoire.css index 96105e1..e817dd4 100644 --- a/static/media/css/grimoire.css +++ b/static/media/css/grimoire.css @@ -116,4 +116,20 @@ h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { } #breadcrumbs li.not-last:after { content: '•'; +} + +@media print { + #breadcrumbs, + #comments, + #footer { + display: none; + } + + a:link { + color: black; + } + :link:after { + content: " (" attr(href) ")"; + font-size: 16px; + } }
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/wiki/hire-me.md b/wiki/hire-me.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..adfbbf2 --- /dev/null +++ b/wiki/hire-me.md @@ -0,0 +1,110 @@ +# Hire Me + +I'm always interested in hearing from people and organizations that I can help, +whether that means coming in for a few days to talk about end-to-end testing or +joining your organization full-time to help turn an idea into reality. + +I live in and around Toronto, ON. I am more than happy to work remotely, and I +can probably help your organization learn to integrate remote work if it doesn't +already know how. + +You can see more about me as a person on +[HireMyFriend](https://hiremyfriend.io/profiles/90b8caa5) or +[LinkedIn](https://ca.linkedin.com/in/ojacobson/). You can also get a sense of +the code I write by looking at this blog, as well as my +[Bitbucket](https://bitbucket.org/ojacobson) or +[Github](https://github.com/ojacobson/) sites: I recommend starting with +[Refreshbooks](https://github.com/ojacobson/refreshbooks) or +[Sparkplug](https://github.com/ojacobson/sparkplug). + +## For Fun + +I regularly revisit problems from old jobs, interesting ideas from the internet, +and whatever else catches my fancy as a way to build up skills with specific +technologies. Right now, I'm tinkering with [AngularJS](http://angularjs.org) +and [Jersey 2](https://jersey.java.net) as a way of building lightweight, +highly-responsive web front ends. Ask me about it and I'll be more than happy to +talk your ear off. I've also run similar projects to explore Node, Django, +Flask, Rails, and other platforms for web development, as well as numerous tools +and frameworks for other platforms. + +I also mentor people new to programming, teaching them how to craft working +systems. This is less about teaching people to write code and more about +teaching them why we care about source control, how to think about +configuration, how to and why to automate testing, and how to think about +software systems and data flow at a higher level. I strongly believe that +software development needs a formal apprenticeship program, and mentoring has +done a lot to validate that belief. + +## FreshBooks (2009-2014) + +During the five years I was with the company, it grew from a 20-person one-room +organization to a healthy, growing two-hundred-person technology company. As an +early employee, I had my hand in many, many projects and helped the development +team absorb the massive cultural changes that come with growth, while also +building a SaaS product that let others realize their dreams. Some highlights: + +* As the lead [MySQL](http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else) database + administrator-slash-developer, I worked with the entire development team to + balance concerns about reliability and availability with ensuring new ideas + and incremental improvements could be executed without massive bureaucracy + and at low risk. This extended into diverse parts of the company: alongside + the operations team, I handled capacity planning, reliability, outage + planning, and performance monitoring, while with the development team, I + was responsible for designing processes and deploying tools to ease testing + of database changes and ensuring smooth, predictable, and _low-effort_ + deployment to production and for training developers to make the best use of + MySQL for their projects. + +* As a tools developer, I built the [Sparkplug](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sparkplug) + framework to standardize the tools and processes for building message-driven + applications, allowing the team to move away from monolithic web applications + towards a more event-driven suite of interal systems. Providing a standard + framework paid off well; building and deploying completely novel event + handlers for FreshBooks’ core systems could be completed in as little as a + week, including testing and production provisioning. + +* As an ops-ish toolsmith, I worked extensively on configuration management + for both applications and the underlying servers. I lead a number of + projects to reduce the risk around deployments: creating a standard + development VM to ensure developers had an environment consistent with + reality, automating packaging and rollout to testing servers, automating the + _creation_ of testing servers, and more. As part of this work, I built + training materials and ran sessions to teach other developers how to think + like a sysadmin, covering Linux, Puppet, virtualization, and other topics. + +## Riptown Media (2006-2009) + +Riptown Media was an software development company tasked with building and +maintaining a suite of gambling systems for a single client. I was brought on +board as a Java developer, and rapidly expanded my role to encompass other +fields. + +* As the primary developer for poker-room back office and anti-fraud tools, I + worked with the customer support and business intelligence teams to better + understand their daily needs and frustrations, so that I could turn those + into meaningful improvements to their tools and processes. These + improvements, in turn, lead to measurable changes in the frequency and + length of customer support calls, in fraud rates, and in the percieved value + of internal customer intelligence. + +* As a lead developer, my team put together the server half of an in-house + casino gaming platform. We worked in tight collaboration with the client + team, in-house and third-party testers, and interaction designers, and + delivered our first game in under six months. Our platform was meant to + reduce our reliance on third-party “white label” games vendors; internally, + it was a success. Our game received zero customer-reported defects during + its initial run. + +## OSI Geospatial (2004-2006) + +At OSI Geospatial, I lead the development of a target-tracking and battlespace +awareness overlay as part of a suite of operational theatre tools. In 2004, the +state of the art for web-based geomatics software was not up to the task; this +ended up being a custom server written in C++ and making heavy use of PostgreSQL +and PostGIS for its inner workings. + +## Contact Me + +Sound good? Curious? Want to discuss any of this some more? You can get ahold of +me at owen.jacobson@grimoire.ca or on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/derspiny). |