John Seward

COMPUTER SKILLS

December, 2003
to present

I presently have a sole proprietership, pubblog.com , which publishes MailSteward , a program for archiving email on the Macintosh.

February, 2001
to November, 2003

As Vice President of Engineering at GreatSchools.org , I was responsible for managing and developing the technology for a major non-profit website. Greatschools averages over 350,000 page views a day, with peak traffic as high as 3 million pages a day. It is served from an Intel cluster running FreeBSD. Perl is the primary CGI programming language. It is a database-driven site, using MySQL, which stores and serves data on all of the public K-12 schools in the country. I was part of the management team, and supervised 2 systems administrators, 2 programmers, and 1 QA technician.

November, 1995
to June, 2000

As Technical Director of SFGate.com , the web site for the San Francisco Chronicle, I built sfgate.com from scratch, designing and programming systems for content display, archiving and searching, translation of numerous feeds, statistics gathering and reporting, ad banner display and tracking, database design and access, and others. In short, all of the technical underpinnings of the first major newspaper site on the web. I was also responsible for the hiring and management of additional technical employees and was part of the management team which met weekly to set the priorities of sfgate.com. Most of the software underpinnings of sfgate were developed in-house, predominantly in Perl, some in C. I did most of the design and coding of the in-house software. At the time I left the Gate, the technical staff consisted of myself, two system administrators, two programmers, and two technical support people.

November, 1994
to November 1995

OEA International . This was a small four person company that developed and sold software for the electronic simulation of complex chip designs on UNIX workstations. I programmed, in C, a set of add-on utilities for the software, and wrote and produced all of the company's user manuals, and also used the software to perform simulations on chip and package designs for customers.

March, 1991
to November 1994

Owner and President, Open Designs, Inc. , a contract software development company. ODI contracted primarily with Microsoft Corp. developing add-ons, converters, and supporting applications for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word using C, C++, WordBasic, and Excel macro language. ODI also developed and sold its own X Windows integrated circuit design software for UNIX workstations.

August, 1984
to March, 1991

Vice President, International Technology Development Corp. I.T.D.C. was a contract software development company which solicited contracts in the United States to be done by programmers in Shanghai, People's Republic of China. My responsibilities included liaison between the programmers in China and the customers in the U.S., writing internal and external software specifications, doing estimates for bids, organizing and supervising a training institute in the U.S. for Chinese programmers, and general technical management.

June 1984
to June 1985

Part-time writer & contract programmer, Whole Earth Software Review. Wrote several articles and reviews for the Whole Earth Software Review and the Whole Earth Software Catalog. Also developed several c-shell programs for The WELL conferencing network which was sponsored by Whole Earth. At that time The WELL ran on a VAX 750 under 4.2 BSD UNIX.

July 1984 to
September 1984

Contract Programmer, Liticom, Limited. Wrote a menu shell system in C which made possible the creation of customized, menu-driven interfaces between the user and the XENIX operating system.

April 1984
to January 1985

Contract Programmer, Lifesaver Systems. Developed a set of programs, written in C, for screen handling, user input, and color graphics, all for the IBM PC. Then developed a large application which employed these tools, also in C. Also wrote several utilities including a disk editing utility, a printer utility, and a graphics character editor.

June 1976
to April 1984

Vice President, The Book Publishing Company. Responsible for designing, developing, implementing and maintaining all of the software systems for a medium size publishing operation. These systems included Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, General Ledger, Data Base Management, Order Entry, and Inventory. Also designed and programmed a file management system and helped develop an educational math program for the Commodore 64 that were published by the company. Also did the documentation, production coordination, and marketing of the software at COMDEX and CES.

prior to 1976

I did a lot of stuff at a number of different places, including working on the assembly line at the Heinz plant in Muscatine, Iowa, washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant in Iowa City, and programming the cost accounting system for Stauffer Chemical Company.