Employment Sought

(Resume posted in plain-text to simplify cutting and pasting. Sorry for the crude formatting.)

    Thomas Lord
    Berkeley, CA 94703
    lord@emf.net
    510-825-7915


    Summary:

    Excellent programmer, founder of successful free software projects
    (GNU Arch, GNU Guile), strong C programmer, configuration/build tools
    experience, years of experience with GNU/Linux and Unix generally.
    Notorious curmudgeon.  Good knowledge of applied CS and practical
    software engineering.  Revision control system expert.  A variety of
    ongoing projects in early stages (a wiki engine, a globally
    distributed file manager, high-level language interpreters, an
    advanced Unicode string library, a few more).  "Merit" winner of an
    Open Source Award (www.opensource.org), Q2 2004.  Long time supporter
    and periodic project maintainer for the Free Software Foundation GNU
    project (www.gnu.org).


    Objective:

    A practical means to support my family and ongoing work, consistent
    with the values associated with the Free Software Movement.
    Attractive positions might range from R&D positions where my
    role is to continue one or more of my projects (or start or join
    a new one) to basic day jobs (order fulfillment, fetching coffee,
    sweeping floors, whatever -- I'm limited only by comparatively
    moderate wage requirements, the amount of time left over for family
    and hacking pursuits, and some physiological constraints on the kinds
    of physical labor I can sustain).   Between those two extremes are
    many options of which I must reject only those which would ask me
    to develop non-free software.


    Experience (highlights):

    01/2001-present
    The GNU Arch revision control system
    Founder and maintainer
    I designed and implemented the GNU Arch revision control
    system and coordinated volunteer contributors for the 
    first several years of its development.  (www.seyza.com
    and www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch).  The first version
    was written as shell scripts;  the current version is
    in C.   Arch has been a successful project, culminating
    ultimately in its "takeover" by Canonical corp. who have
    adopted it as a cornerstone of their business.  This 
    work included developing a configuration system to use
    instead of GNU autoconf and further development of
    "libhackerlab" -- my suite of utilities for C programs.

    A considerable portion of this work was supported by
    monetary gifts from happy users and interested hackers.


    1998-2000
    UUNET Research
    Consultant
    Working remotely and independently I implemented a suite
    of tools for "pointer use debugging" of C programs: a
    drop-in replacement for standard `malloc' with features
    to help detect stray writes and reads.   This work included
    modifications to GCC which provided user-definable read
    and write barriers across all platforms.


    9/1993-12/1995
    Cygnus Support
    Member of the technical staff
    I started the GNU Guile project (a Scheme-based extension
    language).  As part of this work I created a mutual 
    embedding of Scheme in Tcl and vice versa and developed
    a Scheme interface to the Tk toolkit.


    9/1991-8/1993
    Free Software Foundation
    Hacker
    I fixed bugs in GNU sed, began writing a fast regular expression
    engine (completed several years later), and added features to GNU
    Oleo, a simple spreadsheet program.


    8/1987-8/1989
    Information Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University
    At the Andrew project, I developed an autoconf-like set
    of tools for configuration and build management.


    Code samples:
    The latest releases of GNU Arch 1.x and GNU Arch 2.0 are
    good sources for code samples.  Code within these distributions
    represents a spectrum of practical software engineering 
    practices varying according to deadlines and resources available.
    Core parts of "libhackerlab", included in both, show careful
    and steady co-development of code, tests, and documentation.
    "awiki" (in 2.0) shows a useful "working prototype" used to
    explore the design space of wiki syntax generators.  "tla" (in 1.x)
    falls in the middle between those extremes.

    Education:
    Studied at Johns Hopkins University and Carnegie Mellon
    University.   Most of my CS education has been a combination
    of self-directed reading and on-the-job mentor-ships -- I hold
    only a high-school diploma.

Copyright

Copyright (C) 2005 Tom Lord (lord@emf.net)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this software; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.