I Enjoy

...creating useful things. I’ve spent many years taking complex processes and distilling them down into clear and simple interfaces.

...finding the painful points of a problem and smoothing them out by crafting elegant software.

...people and working on teams. I like creatively solving problems and leveraging the strengths of the whole group to create killer solutions.

I have a technology background that provides a foundation for designing great interfaces.

Experience & Abilities

A deep curiosity for how things work and how people use Things. This inquisitiveness defines the products that I produce; to be creatively engaging to the user and solving their problems. I like taking intimidating and complex ideas and making them approachable and inviting.

Experience using tools to convey low fidelity mockups to users to validate the application flow. These include pen and paper, photoshop compositions and lightweight scripted mockups.

11+ years designing and implementing interfaces that intuitively engage the user through visually appealing designs on the desktop, mobile and web.

11+ years in web-oriented software development, encompassing the entire process from server hardware to software, as well as complete backend solutions, from file storage through databases and web-services.

6+ years writing client-side javascript, including jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, Zepto, and other javascript libraries. I am comfortable using javascript and javascript frameworks.

7+ years writing Ruby code, including the Ruby on Rails web framework. Including shopping cart, cms and user forums. I’ve used ruby to write a service for maintaining the software infrastructure on hundreds of differently configured development machines simultaneously .

4+ years writing linux device drivers in C for custom designed hardware.

4+ years writing C++ to control complex custom hardware via intuitive user interfaces. Wrote an HTTP server and client so that our devices could be controlled remotely via a stateless TCP connection. Wrote a html/css/javascript client so customers could interact the hardware remotely.

11+ years of familiarity administering and using Linux at server and desktop level. Design and administration of business critical Linux servers through building, installing and maintaining mission critical servers utilizing multi-terabyte RAIDs. Comfortable with multiple distributions including: SuSE, Ubuntu, RedHat and CentOS.

11+ years in writing high quality code in PHP working with various databases and other external interfaces, including JSON, REST, XML, SOAP, RSS, and proprietary interfaces using the HTTP protocol.

11+ years of relational database experience with MySQL, Postgres and SQLite. Designing, implementing, maintaining, backing-up, restoring and deploying multi-million record databases. Understanding of database normalization, schema design and optimization.

11+ years in creating websites using standards-based HTML and CSS. I grew up along side the web, I purchased and read the first revision of Zeldman’s book.

Comfortable and proficient with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, though I prefer to mockup and design web interfaces in HTML, CSS and Javascript. Experience designing user interfaces with a team on Balsamiq.

6+ year in building AJAX-based interface-patterns. Real world experience with Javascript, Ruby, C++ and PHP and asynchronous client side interfaces.

Working with individuals and groups to understand their problems and design software-based solutions enabling more productive and efficient work.

Viewing software as an art-form, writing code that is readable, elegant, efficient, and malleable in order to be scalable and reusable.

Participating in software development as a hobby via contributing to open-source projects.

Previous Work

Available upon request, just send me an email at Brian@BitByteYum.com.