Mark Paschal

Builder of internet-enabled community software for ten years.
Senior software developer on agile, cross-functional teams building whole products.
Prototyper of full-stack web and mobile applications.

Projects

Improved compatibility of MLKSHK's API with the current specification of OAuth 2.
Redesigned MLKSHK's API reference documentation, implementing an easier content management experience using Sphinx, the standard Python documentation tool.
Improved reliability of automated tests by adapting the application to use Tornado's configuration system.

Evolved a next-generation TypePad dashboard prototype into Leapfrog, a content-focused stream view using “deep” aggregation of multiple social content services.
Worked with web APIs from Twitter, Flickr, TypePad, Vimeo, Tumblr and MLKSHK to integrate those content streams into the Leapfrog experience.
Improved Leapfrog with end customer feedback collected through UserVoice.

Brought a prototype iPhone client for Convore's topical chat system to fighting weight on a short event-driven deadline using standard iOS platform tools.

Devised a simple face-sharing application and rapidly prototyped it in Django and jQuery.
Integrated visitors' web cams into an involving user experience with a bespoke JavaScript-bridged Flash component developed with the Adobe Flex 3 SDK.
Delivered the idea to market fast and cheaply by using the TypePad platform for cloud style photo hosting, social activity sharing, and account management.
Collaborated closely with a professional designer to develop the visual appearance of the site, and implemented that design with the SASS stylesheet authoring language.
Prototyped a mobile face-sharing experience without Flash in an HP webOS 1.4 application.

Six Apart created the TypePad and Movable Type community publishing systems.

Provided Django development and deployment expertise to support the launch of the company's leading conversational marketing product.
Improved project planning and accountability by pushing carefully selected Scrum practices (the retrospective, point-based team velocity, and the burn-down chart).
Participated in discussions to design a badge system to make learning and using TypePad more fun and “game-like.”

Prototyped an API-backed community blog application with Django, refining it with a cross-functional team into the released product.
Worked closely with the TypePad API team to develop a new REST JSON OAuth API meeting both the application's UX needs and the TypePad platform's performance requirements.
Designed and wrote remoteobjects, a core library for rapidly building RESTful web service client libraries in Python.
Reduced latency in Motion's client–server requests by co-writing a Python library for sending parallel HTTP requests in one batch request.
Implemented continuous integration for TypePad API client and server components using a Python CI system, Buildbot, later migrating those tests to Hudson.
Wrote developer documentation, including a house style guide for Python, developer's guides to running Motion with Apache/mod_wsgi and using TypePad's feed subscription API, and several developer blog posts.
Accidentally contributed to a third-party rewrite of a Python OAuth library.

Self-directed to design and develop Action Streams, a personal web profile “news feed” aggregator, later incorporated into Movable Type.
Created a community-focused media microblog experience integrated with web activity and identity providers as part of the Movable Type Motion product.
Improved performance and extensibility of the storage system by adapting code for “narrow table” storage from MT's sister product, TypePad.
Implemented new web technology, including OpenID support for commenters and improved AtomPub API support.

Helped migrate customer data to a new database architecture—from a single PostgreSQL database to user-sharded MySQL partitions—by adapting the product's large stable code base to a next generation rewrite of its object relational mapper.
Improved user experience by implementing TypePad's first rich text editor, integrating an open source RTE and extending it to meet product requirements for semantic HTML.
Improved compatibility with a leading blog writing application, Windows Live Writer, by reverse engineering and implementing a competitor's XML-RPC API extensions.

Helped teams scale up as the company grew from 9 to 100+ employees by deploying and maintaining blog and wiki communication tools on the company intranet.
Developed an IRC bot to administer agile standup meetings for a distributed team using the Perl Bot::BasicBot system.
Wrote and deployed an intranet search engine for logs of the company's private IRC channels, using Sphinx Search and MySQL.
Implemented a tweet style social application for the intranet, with both new posts in Markdown and retweeting of public Twitter tweets by subscription, in Perl using Catalyst and internal “TypeCore” libraries.
Improved ability of internal teams to exchange patches and data by deploying an internal code review tool, a pastebot style snippet sharing tool based on the open source DjangoSnippets.org, and bookmarklet-based link blogging.

Python: Django, WSGI, nose, Buildbot, Sphinx documentation, Flask, Jinja, PyPI, pip, setuptools, Distribute, virtualenv virtual environments, generators, Twisted
Web: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, XML, OpenID, OAuth, weblogs, RSS, Atom, AtomPub, syndication, XML-RPC
Mobile: iOS, iPhone, Cocoa Touch, HP webOS
Perl: CPAN modules, DBI, Catalyst, Test::More, regular expressions
Databases: SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, CouchDB, Sphinx Search
Process: agile, Scrum, git, Mercurial (hg), unit testing, automated testing, continuous integration (CI), Hudson
UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, C, Objective-C, C++