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 or +LinkedIn. You can also get a sense of +the code I write by looking at this blog, as well as my +Bitbucket or +Github sites: I recommend starting with +Refreshbooks or +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 +and Jersey 2 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:

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As the lead MySQL 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.
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As a tools developer, I built the 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.
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.

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