While I have a resume page
for full time work listed, I'm very interested (and available) for doing Macintosh
and iPhone Contract Programming. Take advantage of my 15+ years of experience in both large corporations
(including stints at Adobe & Apple) and small teams & start-ups to make your next Macintosh application
intuitive, popular, and profitable!
Feel free to contact me with your ideas and I'll respond right away.
Working with you, I honestly estimate deadlines and attempt to keep schedules and tasks on track
(which in turn keeps costs to a minimum). If required, I have a team of programming friends I can bring onboard to
get tasks done quickly. I also have experience in writing both
technical specifications and easy-to-read user level documentation.
Here is a list of typical frequently asked questions (also known as F.A.Q.'s; click on the triangle to expand):
Q: Show me a list of projects you've worked on.
Q: Why hire any contractor?
a: Contractors are used by corporations and small businesses when they want to get software written but
don't have the ability (or budget) to allocate a full time employee to do the task. Individuals might also
hire a contractor if they have 1) a really great idea they want to develop and take to market or 2) they want
to make modifications to software that already exists.
a: They don't have to be. It all depends on the tasks & scope of the work to be done and the time that is estimated
to do the task. Contractors do have to pay their rent & daily living expenses, plus contractors have to bear
the cost of extra taxes (self employment tax, for example) and the cost of buying their medical insurance.
a: Only at your own risk. I have three different types of competitors.
1) High schoolers & college students. My experience has been that immature programmers don't typically
don't have the discipline to tackle large projects, adequately architecht software from bottom to top, and
especially don't have the follow through to shepherd a task to completion. For example, I have been called in to take
over for college students in the past, and I subsequently completed the software package and shipped multiple versions of it.
2) Outsourcers and overseas people. The biggest frustration I've heard about outsourcing firms is that one
shouldn't be expected to have to explain how a software product should behave multiple times.
I work in (or relatively close to) your time zone and will actually
pick up the phone and return your e-mails and voice mail messages. One of my projects had me taking over
for a Ukranian software
house and I subsequently resolved a long list of bugs and added in the ability for the software to support
a plug-in architecture.
3) My peers. These are my toughest competitors, because the Macintosh developer community is smaller and
(my impression is that) we all tend to rely on and interact with each other often. I sometimes hire fellow engineers to help me get something done, but
I only do that with the approval of whoever is contracting me.
a: While it ultimately depends on you (and the task to be done), I try to stick to
styles and languages that will allow me to get the best, quality job done as quickly as possible
for you. In most cases, I try to program using the language Objective C (Cocoa). This allows
me to leverage a lot (and the latest technologies) of what the operating system provides. In terms of style,
I have worked under different formal (at Apple) and informal (between myself and other engineers) styles.
I have not done anything ISO 900X related since 1993 or so, but whatever style you wish me to program in I
will do my best.
Here is a partial list of projects worked on:
- Designed "Migration Assistant" to allow iPhone customers to save and sync their data from other Smart phones and PDAs (Dec-07).
More Technical Details
- Adding Kerberos/GSSAPI SSL (security & authentication) support to Mozilla for different mail protocols and the LDAP directory
protocol (May-07).
More Technical Details
- An iTunes playlist sharing application for a social networking website (May-07).
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- A simple popup menu-based application which asychchronously ftp'd movies & music videos down from a website and burns DVDs (May-07).
More Technical Details
- A credit card processing daemon using WebServices & SOAP to interact between servers (June-06).
More Technical Details
- An image browser (Gallery) application using Quartz to display and export photos to other apps
which use a USB hardware based electronic pen (May-06).
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- Teleprompting software using OpenGL to smoothly scroll text, used by television newsreaders, conferences and concerts (April-06).
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- Network kernel extension (driver) to encrypt traffic within a WiFi/Ethernet network with OpenSSL (Feb-06).
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- Voice over IP (VoIP) client utilizing an open source library as the engine (Feb-05).
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- Daemon that observes WWW browsers, looking for activity on websites where points, rebates and
charitable contributions could be earned (Dec-04).
More Technical Details
Client and precise product names cheerfully provided upon request.
