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I'm currently available for short-term projects or part-time work, especially in the Guelph area. My resumé is available here in pdf or html.
I am a software developer with 14 years experience. I particularly like tackling problems at the user/computer interface using user-centred design techniques. In my PhD work, I investigated how and why software developers become disoriented during exploration of their source code. My past projects have included building communication infrastructures to support distributed applications, real-time distributed games, and software programming tools.
I'm currently heading up three open-source projects:
- GT: GT is a groupware toolkit intended to simplify the development of real-time groupware applications. GT provides a connection-oriented communication abstraction, and has been carefully architected to allow tinkering and experimentation by students and researchers. GT is written in C#.
- GroupLab.Networking: A groupware toolkit that provides an alternative programming abstraction of a distributed shared dictionary. The dictionary has a structured keyspace, and provides powerful patterns for querying the dictionary's keys. This abstraction is better suited for applications that are very data centric. .Networking is written in C# using GT.
- BetaPop: A simple billing and payment system intended for supporting coffee, pop, and candy pools. BetaPop is written in C.
Some of my recent projects include:
- RTChess: a fast-paced, multiplayer, distributed chess game — chess reinvented for group play. RTChess was implemented in C# using the GT toolkit, and used Bonjour/ZeroConf and JSPs to simplify local-area configuration.
- Ferret: a proof-of-concept Eclipse-based tool to help developers explore their codebases. Ferret answers a variety of questions (which we called conceptual queries) about program elements, explaining how they relate to the rest of the system. It integrates different sources of information about a program such as the static information available from the JDT, dynamic runtime information from TPTP, plug-in information, and source evolution information. Ferret formed the code of my PhD work. The plugin, relevant papers, and the source is available here.