Jason McIntosh 24 Lexington Ave. #1 Somerville, MA 02143 617-792-3829 jmac@jmac.org SUMMARY I am a software consultant with more than a decade of experience creating solutions for a variety of fields, including business, education, science, and games. My particular expertise involves web-based applications. My professional services are available via Appleseed Software Consulting (www.appleseed-sc.com), a company that I founded in early 2008. EXPERIENCE * October 2006 - Present Independent software consultant, specializing in database-backed web application development. My primary tools include server-side Perl and client-side JavaScript / AJAX. My favorite development environment involves running Mason on a LAMP platform. In February 2008, I incorporated Appleseed Software Consulting, and now operate as its head consultant. * September 2005 - Present President and founder of Volity Games. This is a startup based around Volity, an open platform for multiplayer casual games, and my own invention. The Volity Network lets independent game developers rapidly author and publish games, and then profit through a revenue-sharing system of our own design. As president, my principal roles involve managing the Volity project's technological development, as well as overseeing the operation of the company and its employees. My technical tasks include maintaining the Perl-based code that runs all of the Volity Network's public services, including all the various applications found on the volity.net website, which make use of database-driven dynamic content, AJAX, and simple JavaScript. I am also responsible for that site's design, text, and general operation. The Volity project makes use of a number of open technologies including Jabber (XMPP), SVG, and ECMAScript. I have become proficient in all of these since starting the project in 2003 (two years before launching a company based on it). * July 2002 - September 2005 Senior Bioinformatics Programmer for the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston. I played a key role in the development of ChemBank, a web-based application that allowed chemists and biologists to store, review, and analyze the results of high-throughput screening experiments. During this period, I co-authored a second book for O'Reilly, "Mac OS X in a Nutshell". * October 2001 - July 2002 Self-employed as a freelance writer and computer consultant. During this period, I co-authored the book "Perl & XML", and wrote articles on Mac OS X for the O'Reilly Network online magazine. When not writing, I hired myself out as a by-the-hour programmer, crafting dynamic websites using Mason. * November 2000 - October 2001 Software tools specialist for O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. (now O'Reilly Media) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I maintained and created software that helped the company publish its books, both in print and in its more recent strides to publish online, with XML as the vehicle of choice in all cases. My work environment was primarily Perl on Unix. My largest project was a bundle of Perl modules and programs that converted DocBook XML documents to Adobe FrameMaker files and back again. In fact, just about all my projects involved folding, spindling and mutilating DocBook documents in one way or another -- much of my other interesting work involved working on the software that prepares O'Reilly book files for Safari, a service that makes book content available on the Web. * December 1998 - October 2000 Programmer for The Maine InternetWorks, Inc. (MINT), an Internet and network service provider in central Maine (no longer incorporated -- it was being slowly digested by Adelphia when I left, and has since been excreted). I helped develop and maintain a variety of software, largely web-based applications, for use both in house and by MINT's customers. Tools used for all projects were almost exclusively Perl and MySQL. I was responsible for the development of MINT's first attempts at online commerce, as well as a web-based application server using the Apache web server and its mod_perl module. While in this position, I developed familiarity and then advocacy for open-source software; MINT used Linux as its primary operating system for its servers and internal workstations, and all its mission-critical applications were open source as well. * October 1997 - November 1998 Educational Technician and Assistant to the Director of Technology for the town of Hermon, Maine's school and Information Services departments. Assisted in the management of the town's freenet ISP, and coordinated the technology-related inventory and curriculum for its three schools and adult education programs. I developed and maintained integrated, Web-based information management solutions with UserLand Frontier and FileMaker Pro, used by both the school department and local municipal entities and businesses. I also performed tech support for the schools when the need arose. * July 1996 - September 1997 Sales and purchasing manager at Technology Source (also variously known as Computer World, Maine Advanced Computer Systems, and Honest ABE's Computers), a computer sales and service shop in Bangor, Maine. Required an expertise of personal computer, network and Internet use, specializing in Macs and compatibles and their related operating systems and applications, in order to act as a consultant as well as a salesperson for the shop's customer base of (at the time of my resignation) 3,000 home and business users. * May 1995 - February 1996 City Editor for the University of Maine's semi-weekly, student-run newspaper, The Maine Campus. Was responsible for each issue's local news content, and recruiting, supervising and giving assignments to the paper's staff writers. * February 1995 - July 1996 News Clerk at the Bangor Daily News. Assisted editors and writers on production evenings by writing cutlines, researching names, sizing photographs, and running courier duties and other odd tasks. * March 1994 - May 1995 News Editor for the The Maine Campus. Used Macs to design the layout of each issue's front page and news sections, write headlines and cutlines, and select and edit stories from wire services to use in each issue. Also trained, over time, five other Campus editors on layout for their respective sections. * September 1991 - January 1994 Consulting Assistant with UMaine's "MacAct" program, which leased Macintosh computers to on-campus students. Installed Macs in dormitory rooms each September and spent the rest of the academic year as a full time system and network use instructor and consultant for the program's users. PUBLICATIONS Books Mac OS X in a Nutshell, co-authored with Chuck Toporek and Chris Stone, originally published in 2003 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., with more recent editions published in 2004 and 2005. A deep reference to Apple Computer's Mac OS X operating system. Perl & XML, co-authored with Erik T. Ray, published in 2002 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. A book about processing XML with the Perl programming language. Articles I semi-regularly write articles and weblog entries about various technology topics for the O'Reilly Network, an online magazine aimed at developers. I also keep a weblog there. See my author page there for an index of both. (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/174) Of particular note is a column on ComicsML, published on The O'Reilly Network in 2001. It proposes and describes an XML-based markup language for online comics, inspired by the writings of Scott McCloud. It got Slashdotted. Miscellany I have written much of the Volity project's documentation. My website, http://www.jmac.org, contains all sorts of strange things that I have programmed, written, or otherwise created over the last few years. It includes essays, journals, games, experiments, and other collected detritus of my creative life. Related Skills Development Most of my information technology experience involves using the magic LAMP platform -- Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl -- to create dynamic, database-driven websites. I am also experienced with using XML to organize and transform documents and data, with particular skill in using Perl and XML together. I am an expert with the Perl programming language, which I have used nearly every day, both personally and professionally, since 1998. Through Perl, I regularly process plain text (such as logs and config files), HTML/XHTML/CSS web pages, SQL databases, images, web services through SOAP or XML-RPC, and just about anything else I need to do with information crunching. I expect Perl to be my main tool with any job I take. My recent entrepreneurial experiences with Volity Games have provided me with deep knowledge of the XMPP messaging protocol, the SVG vector graphics standard, and manipulation of the XML DOM via ECMAScript (a.k.a JavaScript). The Volity Network is largely based on Perl libraries and programs I wrote that must handle all of these technologies, and which are publicly available on the CPAN (http://search.cpan.org/~jmac/Frivolity-0.6.2/). Volity has further required me to keep my Java programming skills reasonably sharp to assist with development of Gamut, Volity's client application. I have dabbled in C, C++, and Objective C, and can generally pick up any programming language quite quickly, if I have reason to. As far as style goes, I always insist on documenting everything and using version control (preferably Subversion) wherever possible, whether I am working alone or as part of a team. Operating Systems I am currently strongest in Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and Unix (especially Linux and BSD). At present, my primary day-to-day operating system is Mac OS X. As with languages and applications, I can pick up any other OS as needed. EDUCATION * May 1996 Graduated from the University of Maine with bachelor's degrees in journalism and English. AWARDS AND SCHOLARSHIPS * Received a four-year presidential scholarship from the University of Maine. * Received a $1,000 scholarship from the Maine Press Association. REFERENCES References available upon request.