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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