We are offsite, but not offshore...
First, let's dispense with the "fake big company" nonsense. This is a one-man shop, it would be pretty silly to use the usual stuffy third person form for the text here...pretending to have written the software that drives this site but not the text that lives here. There are pluses and minuses to the size of this company. On the one hand,
if I fall off a cliff (not altogether unlikely if you've seen my nature photography), it would be a major setback not only for me, but for you as well. Assuming for the moment that
doesn't happen, you get the advantage of very personal and responsive service and significantly lower development costs.
Good, now that we have that nonsense out of the way, let me get you oriented. You've landed on a Ruby On Rails with Ajax site that I wrote specifically to showcase some of my talents in that area and at the same time give you a few different ways to get to know me. Since this is essentially an online resume, it really doesn't lend itself to the use of databases and fancy plug-ins or even "Edge Rails", don't expect to be overly wowed by the skill level required. If you can think of something more exciting to do with Rails on a site like this, I would love to hear about it.
The popup menu in the upper left is just for fun. It changes the CSS (stylesheets) used by the site and makes it all look very different, without actually affecting the code or the content of the site. The "Conservative" selection is just a no-nonsense "I came here to read about your experience" format. The rest are sort of a walk down memory lane to see how "state of the art" Web design has changed over the years.
A bit further down you will find a set of "tabs" that take you to different types of content which will help you get to know me in different ways.
That's it in a nutshell. Go ahead and explore the site and the places it links to. I hope to hear from you soon.
First, the "Reader's Digest version":
I'm a degreed Electrical Engineer turned programmer (20 years ago), and an avid nature photographer. After more than 15 years of watching my expertise (embedded C programming) fade away into the past Millennium, I recently chose to "jump ahead", and start a new career writing Web related software and specializing in what has become the new Gold Standard in web programming -- Ruby On Rails.
I may be a very geeky artist, or perhaps just a somewhat artistic geek. My two favorite things to do in life, in no particular order, are creating things that I find esthetic, and solving "geeky problems". The problem with the artistic half is that I can't draw or paint or sing, so for the first few years of my life I was just a frustrated artist. When I picked up a real camera for the first time and discovered that I have "an eye for photography", that frustration came to an end. While I enjoyed photography as my only enduring hobby for a good many years, it always seemed like there was too much about it that I didn't like. In particular, having to wait several days to see "what I got", and the whole darkroom thing, which never appealed to me.
Happily, around the start of the new Millenium, digital photography first moved into a quality level that made it applicable to professional and artistic photography. Since that time, my photography has dovetailed with my computer skills to bring about a real renaissance in this once flagging hobby. You can view some of my nature photography on my
JeffPritchard.com site.
In an effort to keep this page on the theme of a "bio" rather than just a resume in a different form, let me round out my self-description with the following miscellaneous information:
- I make my homes (both of them) in sunny San Diego California, USA
- In addition to my "house in town", I also own some land in the local mountains
- I like to spend weekends "playing in the dirt" with my Bobcat tractor at my "mountain retreat"
- I'm a new car addict - I've owned about twenty nice cars in the thirty years I've been driving
- My goal is to build a house on my land and do freelance development full time, telecommuting from there.
- I love to work -- I hate looking for work...a strong incentive to keep my clients happy
This section will give you as much or as little information as you might like on the types of work I've done over the years. The most salient points are these...
- I have built four big Rails apps and several other HTML/CSS websites - with about 3 years of Rails experience, I'm a "Rails Expert".
- The rest of my 20+ years of experience is relevant only as "seasoning", and does not pertain to my new career as a Web Application developer.
- I'm an old dog, but no stranger to learning new tricks. (for instance, I recently added iPhone development)
- With about three years of Rails development following a 20 year career, I am a very experienced and stable engineer/developer.
- Despite the above, I love to work and hate looking for work, so my rates are on the low end of the Web development software engineer spectrum.
What follows is a condensed version of my resume, with the things most relevant to Web development at the beginning. It plays fast and loose with the time-stream, but provides a realistic overview of what I bring to the table as a Web developer and a Software Engineer. You may find it somewhat guilty of "name dropping", but I feel that adds some flavor and makes some of it easier to relate to and put in perspective. Think of it as a stream of consciousness explanation of what I've done over the years, somewhat like what you might hear from me in an interview. It starts now and works its way back into the mists of antiquity...
- I designed, developed, debugged, and took to market a "Contact Management" Rails App called clientlunchbox.com
- I "saved" a large Rails-based "RFID bracelet" system (front-end and back-end) that another developer failed at.
- I designed, developed, debugged, and took to market an indescribable Rails App called Synergy-Site.com
- I designed, developed, debugged, and took to market an opinion polling Rails App called Rrankk.com
- I built this simple "resume" site using basic Ruby on Rails and Ajax and CSS techniques
- I wrote an "E-bay for answers" type Rails with Ajax site for a startup company
- I learned to use Ruby, Rails, Ajax, Subversion, and Capistrano in my spare time
- I created a couple of large (75 pages) HTML "infopreneur" sites to learn more about Web development
- I led a team of twelve Software Engineers in developing the worlds first PalmOS Smartphones
- I did PalmOS contract software work for several clients including Proctor and Gamble and U.C. Irvine
- I wrote much of what Palm still uses today as their Macintosh desktop software (contract)
- I wrote an award winning disk utility called HSM Toolkit for Macintosh
- I spent several years doing "Agile Software Development" on Macintosh before anybody had a name for it
- I wrote a top-selling Macintosh troubleshooting and benchmarking product called "Snooper"
- I developed both the hardware and software for a multi-CPU workstation for animation professionals
- I worked on a team that developed a training system for F15-E Aircraft maintenance personnel
- I led the team that developed the firmware for the worlds first professional digital camera (Kodak)
- I got a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering at University of Missouri - Rolla
- I survived High School as a tall skinny nerd with glasses and braces
This screen is just a link to some examples of the web development I've done.
Clientlunchbox.com -- This is my most recent contract project. It is a contact management system designed specifically for use by Real-estate agents/brokers. It's strong point is
bugging the heck out of an agent with helpful suggestions of what they should be doing to get listings and clients. This project is "mostly done", and currently in a "low funding" phase.
Go ahead and sign up for a free demo account at clientlunchbox
Synergy-Site.com -- This is actually my own invention. Elsewhere you will see mention of a couple of "infoprenuer" sites that I put together some time ago. Synergy-Site takes that to
a new level, by allowing other people to build pages for the sites and get paid by Google for the advertising that shows up there. The majority of this development effort is "behind the scenes", where some big hairy software organizes the effort that these other people put in, annoys them via email to get them to write some more, builds all of the html pages that eventually
go up on the site...lots of background activity. This project is basically "done", but not yet launched, as I need to do some prep work on the HTML sites first. You can find it here
Synergy Site.
RRankk.com -- This site is all about letting users set up fun and interesting ranking polls that anyone can vote on. I welcome you to go to Rrankk.com and have a look around. The site was done over the course of a few months by just myself and one other part-time developer. All of the UI work is mine. While I learned some things watching the other guy do the database work on this site, I'm quite comfortable doing that work as well. This was a fun project, but hasn't had as much marketing done for it as needed. This was my second major Rails development, and the first to actually make its way to the public. Please note that there have been a few browser revs since this came out and it has rusted a bit. I'm hoping the owner will have me clean the site up some time soon.
Alas, my first major Rails app had the carpet yanked out from under its feet just short of completion. Since the startup company that funded that effort was unable to further capitalize it, it is not deployed in any public forum, so I cannot point you to it as an example of an in-use popular app of my creation. That app consists of 9 controllers, 2 complex models, and 6 very heavily ajax'ed views which would, if one took into account all of the content that gets slid into and out of view, amount to more like twenty pages.
Outside of the Ruby on Rails arena, there are a few other sites I can point to that show I didn't just hop off the turnip truck when it comes to the Web. These are sites that I built myself and hosted on my own unix server.
My Nature Photography Site (JeffPritchard.com) Note: this site is currently under re-construction. This site has been around the longest, and was originally just created to showcase my photography hobby for friends and family. One of the first efforts I made at getting into Web development was to learn a little bit of javascript. The main page of this site is evidence of that, while the remainder of the site was just created long ago with a gallery creation software package. While this endeavor helped me to stick my toe in the icy water of Web development, I consider it's primary usefulness to have been the proof it provided to me that fancy websites should be done "server side", with as little javascript as possible. Getting this one page to behave in a similar fashion on just three different browsers was an exercise in frustration...hence my immediate and successful lateral arabesque into the world of Ruby on Rails.
My Credit Cards and Loans Site This site was built using an online business development site called SBI, but has since been moved over to my own hosting. This site consists of roughly 75 well optimized pages and contributes nicely to my "hosting fund" via Google Adsense income. This site needs to grow quite a bit before it gets "the big traffic".
Another "infoprenuer" site that will be used to launch/advertise the Synergy-Site project.
Yet Another "infoprenuer" site that will be used as one of the "destination" sites for the Synergy-Site project.
This contact info is provided as an image to prevent the Web Scrapers from scavenging it...
