Hi Friends

I'm a programmer interested in helping with the open source ecology project.  I've spent the last few years working as the lead programmer for one of the top web development studios in Maine and am now looking for a way to apply my skills toward sustainability.  You all seem like a good crew of seriously gifted people who've come up with some really interesting ways to use your brains to help our planet, and i think I'd learn a lot and have a bunch to contribute.

Here is my skill-set:

front-end: i'm no graphic designer, but i can slice and dice any png /psd design file into cross-browser compatible css / html / jquery, and am super comfortable doing basic layout tasks in fireworks.  i built the front-end (both the browser-side and email-side) of www.villagevines.com - which has 120k+ members.  to be honest, this is the work i find the least interesting, but it's often the most useful and i really don't mind doing it, especially when it's for a good cause.

back-end: i like lamp systems a lot.  i'm decent in the shell and am familiar with svn / git, can handle basic htaccess / server config stuff and can do most sql stuff - multi-table queries sometimes take me a bit to word correctly.  i like scripting my servers in php - and have done a lot with joomla and code igniter and somewhat less with wordpress and drupal, but i can usually make good sense out of most mvc-driven app-development frameworks.  i built these:

www.mainemademaplesyrup.com / www.ogden-media.com / www.level8ds.com.

apps: i've worked on a bunch of jquery components - including forking archive.org's book reader into a facebook-integrated yearbook tagger - apps.facebook.com/tulaneforlife.  i'm good with most apis - json over http, soap, oauth - and have built clients for many apis including, google maps, youtube, flickr, vimeo, tumblr, authorize, usps etc. as well as a whole bunch of facebook api clients.  I also love complex problem-solving algorithms - here's a javascript program I made that solves Sudoku puzzles: http://level8ds.com/dev/rob/sudoku/ (it's all un-encrypted client-side scripting, so you should be able to read it easily enough if you're curious about how it works) - i'm currently working on some language processing stuff for Sailthru.com.



Here is a bit about me:

I grew up in Newton, MA and started writing code through the high school extension program at MIT.  In college, I was fascinated by social sciences and history - and I received a BA in Urban Studies from Haverford College in 2008 and completed a short graduate program in journalism in 2009.  Currently, I live in Maine and split my time between an organic farm cooperative and the city of Portland, where I do contract work and play drums in a funk band.  I'm really intrigued by the intersection of social and environmental concerns - and would love to work on a computer system or app that mobilized social networking to make our civilization more sustainable and democratic.