Status

I am a retired web developer, and I am not looking for contract work or employment. I am working on best applying my experience towards doing my bit for the world, while keeping a healthy lifestyle. I would be interested in using my expertise and skills on one or more open source projects.

Current Projects

I am currently working on a website to help people be able to build their own inexpensive Rice Huller. I will be building the rice hullers, and from that experience, plan to develop simple instructions to put on the website.

I am currently working on a website (not ready for production) to help manage a diet. This will include:

• keeping track of specific nutritional requirements (such as carbohydrates consumed, glycemic load, oxalates for managing kidney stones, etc.). The nutritional data will initially use data uploaded from the USDA databases.
• helping develop meals to meet the nutritional needs
• helping develop recipes that will have the nutritional data of the meals.
• I am developing this for myself, as I have been successfully keeping my prostate cancer under control using a diet to manage my blood sugar levels.

Building our own Sauna. I am making sure that in my retirement, that I am doing sufficient physical activity to maintain my health. Our current project is to build (ourselves) a regular sauna (with rocks for steam). Our goal is to have it going this winter :)

About Me

I am a seasoned web developer (developing websites since 1998, and programming since 1977) who values producing quality work. After many years developing and maintaining my own or other's websites, I have found the folowing things are important for website excellence:

• Having clear and concise requirements after working with all stakeholders (so we are programming the right things).
• Having tests automated as much as possible, and to cover as much code as is reasonable (to ensure the programming does the right things). Tests should align with User and System Documentation, as well as align with completed requirements and solved issues.
• Having a working list of outstanding issues and requirements that is easily found by all stakeholders and developers (to continue doing the right things).
• Having comprehensive installation procedures for development and production that are easily found and kept up to date as part of system documentation.
• When working on a team, I have found agile scrum extremely valuable in giving the end users controls over the project priorities, while also giving the technical team the authority and responsibility for product quality.
• If there is more than one developer, having the developers work as a team when solving problems (including others in choices and decisions while developing), and do careful code reviews to ensure the code meets standards and is understandable and well documented.
• For an insightful talk about how to have a high quality software development team, see: Marian Petre on "Expert software developer's software approach to error"