Clive Holloway - Perl Developer

welcome

quick start

• my plain, concise resume is available in doc and odt formats.
• code sample available on request - just ask.
• and you also might want to browse my perlmonks postings

introduction

I'm a Perl programmer with over 8 years' experience in a variety of environments, and I'm currently looking for challenging projects that use Perl to do interesting things (I need to telecommute for work outside of Phoenix, but I'm happy to come work on remote sites for periods of time too when needed).

I love variety and change, and thrive in environments where I'm allowed to wear many hats depending on my current goals.

Over the years I've been involved in many aspects of projects - from planning and liaising with sponsors to correctly identify project scope, to QA and deployment.

And I'd love to hear from you if you think I might be a good fit in your organization.

cLive ;-)

education

I am always learning new skills to fit current tasks and enjoy the challenge this presents. For example, over the last year I've learned POE, DJabberd and the ins and outs of several XMPP XEP documents.

At school, I focused primarily on Math.

In 1992, I received a Bachelors Degree in Pure Mathematics (Grade 2:1) from RHUL, London University.

In High School, I studied Mathematics, Further Mathematics and Physics at 'A' level, achieving A grades for each taken.

history

In 1996, I set up my own web design company in the UK. After a couple of lean years (this was rural England in the mid 90's!), I was bored of web design and wanted to focus on learning to program.

So I sold my share, and persuaded a client (JPI) to fund me to write some e-commerce software. For the next couple of years, I worked on developing the software before JPI changed business focus towards touchscreens and, in a moment of irony, sold the e-commerce software back to the company I'd originally set up.

On arrival in the US, I did a little contract work before finding a perfect position at iPower in 2002. I worked there for over four years and had many roles throughout this challenging and enjoyable time - developer, manager, architect, as well as making a rather good latte (yes, this is an important skill - especially on a Monday morning).

In January 2007, I left iPower to work for Fonality. There, I spent just over a year converting an IRC/Asterisk server to XMPP/Asterisk as a telecommuter. For various reasons, this project was canceled on March 17th, 2008.

achievements

There are several things over the years that I have been quite proud of:

• battled through the pioneer stages of building a successful web design company in the UK
• wrote e-commerce software that sold several hundred copies, even though it was written in some really scary Perl.
• implemented a standards compliant web site for an employment agency while on contract
• at iPower:
  • planned and managed development of their bespoke, customers' website control panel, planned and implemented the company's intranet and Jabber IM services
  • identified and resolved several company wide processes in dire need of automation at iPower.
  • encouraged and coached employees who showed promise to learn new skills and push themselves within the company
• at Fonality:
  • deconstructed and re-factored piles of functional modules into more manageable OO chunks
  • built a test suite and began test automation
  • implemented log4perl across the project, managing all logging from a single config file

key skills

These are the skills I use regularly. Over the years I have encountered and effectively used many technologies - from Cobalt RaQ 3 server administration to FrontPage extension debugging (shudder), to Cold Fusion - but these are the ones I still use on a regular basis.

Perl: DBI, CGI, Djabberd, Test::More, Log::Log4perl, Template::Toolkit, POE, ImageMagick, GD, and a lot more along the way.

Core Technical: XMPP, sqlite3, Apache, MySQL, Linux, FreeBSD, Javascript, CSS, XHTML, SSH, HTTP, CVS/Subversion

Other Technical: PHP, Java, Bash, Awk

General: Editing/Proofing, Plain English, technical writing, product planning and design, process designing and improving, developer management and, of course, making damn good lattes.

Feel free to drop by Perlmonks to see some of the things I've covered over the years. I haven't visited there much lately though - most of the problems I've encountered have been very project specific and I have been finding the DJabberd and POE mailing lists more useful resources.