Mark Paschal

markpasc@markpasc.org

Ten-year builder of internet community software in Python and Perl.
Senior software developer on agile, cross-functional teams building whole products.
Most recently, built an open source blog application for high-scale communities, developed in concert with a new web service API.

Six Apart, Ltd., San Francisco, CA (2004-present)

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

Built a Django community blog system, working with the TypePad API team to develop a new REST JSON OAuth API, the TypePad Group API.
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.
Wrote developer documentation, including a Python house style guide (Six Apart is a Perl shop) and a developer's guide to running Motion with Apache/mod_wsgi.
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 the Movable Type product.
Adapted code from sister product, TypePad, to implement a narrow table data storage system for better performance and extensibility.
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-based 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 about 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.
Wrote and deployed an intranet search engine for logs of the company's private IRC channels, using Sphinx Search and MySQL.
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 link sharing and tweet applications.

Python: Django, WSGI, nose, Buildbot, Sphinx documentation, PyPI, pip, setuptools, Distribute, virtualenv virtual environments, generators, Twisted
Web: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, XML, OpenID, OAuth, weblogs, RSS, Atom, AtomPub, syndication, XML-RPC
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)
UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, C, C++