Kellan Elliott-McCrea

Summary

Eight years experience as active member of Internet community designing and building consumer-facing Web applications. Co-founded Web startup, and ran it through acquisition by Palm. Author of several well-regarded open source software packages. Very current on web technologies, practices, and business models. Combine excellent software development skills, with keen understanding of Internet business and community development issues. Large social network of other top web developers. Widely read blog found at laugingmeme.org

Employment History

Hackr
Flickr.com Sunnyvale, CA
May 2006 - present

Work on Flickr.com

Consultant
Odeo.com, Aspiration Tech Boston, MA
2005 - 2006

Consulted on emerging Web trends. Provided feature feedback on sociability, tagging, APIs, openness, and syndication. Delivered Rails driven apps in rapid, iterative small team environments.

Built multi-threaded, "smart" podcast crawler. Crawler made extensive use of Content-Type/HTTP Range headers to minimize drain on external audio providers while validating file encoding, type, and ID3 metadata.

Software Engineer
Tides Foundation/Groundspring Seattle, WA
2003-2005

Lead developer on "eBase Enterprise", widely anticipated Web-based advocacy toolkit, and membership database.

Researched, and built PHP5 web framework targeting best practice large hosted installations, and support for 3rd party plugins.
Managed diverse communities for hybrid open source strategy. Introduced transparency cocktail of blogs/wikis/events to traditionally closed foundation culture.
Extended PEAR's DB::DataObject to provide full support for Fowler's Class Table Inheritance data model. Changes submitted upstream.

Web Consultant
Freelance San Francisco, CA
2002

Built community engagement tools for Rockwood Leadership. Integrated custom web app, and heavily modified Mailman install facilitated ongoing conversations among training alums with nearly 80% retention over 3 years.

Principal Developer/Scheduling Engineer
Palm Cambridge, MA
2000-2001

Researched, and developed web-based group scheduling services.

Architected, and built distributed Free/Busy group scheduling engine with web and wireless interfaces. Provided abstract SPI, implemented with RMI, to allow future backend compatibility with emerging calendaring standards. (e.g. CAP)
Co-wrote the development strategy and framework for migration of entire web interface for My.Palm.com calendar from ASP to a (pre-Struts) model 2 JSP solution.
Prototyped indexed search of XML encoded event feeds using Lucene package.

Co-Founder/CTO
MetaEvents Amherst, MA
1998-2000

Led development from inception to acquisition. MetaEvents built local, event centric destination sites in 2nd and 3rd tier markets by giving away self-publishing calendar tools, and aggregating the content.

Company acquired by Palm to add group scheduling features to their web-based PIM.

Web Engineer
C2Labs San Francisco, CA
1997

Introduced early adoption of Java Servlets. Clients included: HP, Integral, Swiss Bank Warburg.

Education

Hampshire College (Amherst, MA)

Projects and Accomplishments

Creator and maintainer of MagpieRSS, PHP feed parser.

"the most popular RSS parser on the Web".

Chapters in 3 books, over 300,000 downloads, used in over 100 applications (including popular blogging platform, Wordpress).
Member of Bloglines advisory group.
Co-authored RSS 1.0 events module.
Maintained Perl XML::RSS (2002-2004).
Author of 2 filed patents for PDA based group scheduling
Lead Developer on Protest.net, a twice Webby-nominated event portal
Founding member of "tech cabal" for Indymedia.org

Indymedia, a participatory media network found in November 1999, grew, in 4 years, to 100+ sites, on 6 continents, with daily traffic topping 1 million pages.
Creator of WifiMug, a community guide of free wireless coffee shops (Seattle, Vancouver, Boston, and Chicago)
Contributing author O'Reilly's "Syndication Hacks", pending publication.
Author of the blog Laughingmeme.org; frequently cited regarding calendaring, RSS, and tagging.

Core Technical

Programming (8 years): Perl, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Java, Python, and patterns
Web Development (8 years): (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, and server-side techniques including: MVC, caching, templates, and distributed computing
System administration (5 years): Apache, Linux/Debian, mod_perl, MySQL, CVS, SVN, Postfix, and Squid
XML/Syndication (6 years): RSS, Atom, libxml2, expat, REXML, tidy, iconv, and HTTP
Calendaring (6 years): iCalendar, Perl DateTime::*, CalDAV, and participant IETF Calsch WG