Joe Johnston

Cambridge, MA
Email: jjohn@taskboy.com
URL: http://taskboy.com

Are you looking for a self-starting technical lead for your web-based projects? Do you need someone to architect an n-tiered distributed application in a heterogenous environment? I've been building solutions with Open Source tools and commercial operating systems since 1997. I work well in both team environments and on solo efforts. Let's work together to get the job done.

Computer Skills

Languages	Operating Systems	Applications	Technologies
Perl PHP Java Python SQL JavaScript UNIX Shell ActionScript (Flash) ASP (VBScript) C	Linux (RedHat EL5) Microsoft Windows 2003, XP, 2000 MacOS X Solaris	Apache MySQL RT/Mantis OpenLDAP IIS ActiveDirectory Samba VMware ESX, GSX, Server, Workstation VirtualServer 2005 XenSource VirtualIron Pygame	CGI/mod_perl Sockets Web services: XML-RPC/SOAP XML/XSLT Template Toolkit RSS Java Swing Windows Installers Porting Linux applications Cross-platform scripting

Employment History

Software Consultant
Independent Contractor
Oct. 2001 - present

Projects:

Leostream: Senior Developer
- Helped design and build the Leostream Host Agent
- Built the Leostream Host Proxy virtual appliance
- Built Leostream Connect/Java for Linux, Mac OS X
- Built Leostream Virtual Appliance installer, a Java-based Windows application to faciliate installing Leostream virtual appliances on ESX 3
- Ported VirtualController to Windows from Linux
- Customer technical support
- Internal IT infrastructure: mail, web site, QA, bug tracking, web store e-commerce site
- Onsite training for enterprise customers
CareerSearch: Technical Lead
- Ground-up rewrite of their web application using Apache, mod_perl, Template Toolkit and MySQL
- Application capacity planning
- Code reviews
- Web crawling
O'Reilly: Consultant
- Designed an HTML layout for an intranet search engine.
- Wrote technical documentation for an internal mod_perl templating system comprising more than 100 Perl modules and templates.

Senior Software Engineer
O'Reilly and Associates
April 2000 - Sep. 2001

Projects:

Designed and implemented a Digital Assement Management system that tracks metainformation of book projects. Created both a web and command line utility to query that information.
Provided XML-RPC glue in ASP for Safari, ORA's online book initiative.
Facilitated the integration of various databases into a company-wide data warehouse.

Teacher
Northeastern University
Aug. 2000 - Dec. 2000

Designed and taught an introduction to programming with Perl class targeted at Bioinformatics certificate candidates.

Software Engineer & System Administrator
CS Information Technologies
Nov. 1997 - Apr. 2000

Projects:

Responsible for maintaining five production websites, all running from the same Perl code base.
Implemented a machine monitoring system to detect high CPU usage or outages.
Designed and implemented OO perl systems to extract data from various proprietary formats, corrected errors in that data and produced a database in CareerSearch format, suitable for CSIT's Windows and Internet Products.
Designed a perl module to parse and correct postal addresses.
Designed and maintained portions of the internal MySQL database.
Administered Linux firewalls, production web servers and proprietary data engines.

Web Designer & Maintainer
www.pseudocertainty.com
2002 - 2006

Projects:

Hosted podcast about paranormal news and Science Fiction
Implemented a CMS in PHP for the site
Podcast listed on Apple's iTunes

Web Designer & Maintainer
www.aliensaliensaliens.com
Dec 1995 - 2002

Projects:

Conceived and implemented a popular website for UFO buffs. Used Apache/mod_perl and a MySQL database. Created a custom templating language. Supports user logins, comments, a search function and web administration tools. The backend provides a web based authoring tool that allows non-programmers to instantly publish content.
Site awarded Lycos Top 5% of the Internet

Education

BA in Computer Science, May 1998. GPA: 3.47 - Dean's List
University of Massachusetts

Publications

Programming Web Services with XML-RPC; Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Ed Dumbill; O'Reilly Media
Unix Power Tools, 3rd ed.; Shelley Powers, Jerry Peek, Tim O'Reilly, Mike Loukides, Joe Johnston; O'Reilly Media
The Best of the TPJ: Computer Science & Perl Programming; Jon Orwant (Editor); O'Reilly Media
The Best of the TPJ: Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk; Jon Orwant (Editor); O'Reilly Media
"Building Directory Services with Net::LDAP"; The Perl Journal; EarthWeb
"Beyond Hard-Coded HTML with Mason"; The Perl Journal;
"Perl, A Programmer's Companion Reviewed"; The Perl Journal Readable Publications
"Introduction to SOAP and Perl"; developerWorks (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/)
"XML-RPC as Middleware"; developerWorks (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/)
"Introduction to XML-RPC"; developerWorks (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/)
"Ilya Regularly Expresses"; http://www.perl.com
"Damian Conway Talks Shop"; http://www.perl.com
"ANSI Standard Perl?"; http://www.perl.com
"Using XML-RPC and C"; http://www.xml.com
"XML-RPC and Binary Data"; http://web.oreilly.com

Conferences

VMware 2006
VMware TSX 2005, Florida
VMware 2005
SDExpo East 2001: Presented a talk introducing XML-RPC with Perl and PHP.
O'Reilly P2P Conference 2001: Presented a case study of XML-RPC as used by O'Reilly.

Interests

Music. Composing and recording songs at home
Mountain Biking
Reading
Cable access TV