Outstanding software engineer with twelve years experience creating high-profile Macintosh applications, excellent domain knowledge and communication skills, proven track record of excellent performance, and high productivity with exemplary code quality.
Principal Software Engineer: Primary contributor to many Netscape and AOL Macintosh products, focusing on quality, performance and user experience. Quickly became productive in three large cross-platform codebases, demonstrating thorough understanding of complex architectures and excellent bug fixing skills.
Proposed and implemented a new wizard-based UI for AOL Service Assistant, clarifying the user interaction. Implemented much of the audio engine, and the user interface for AOL Radio, as well as parts of the SOAP-based communications layer.
Orchestrated and implemented a successful transition from a cross-platform C++ wxWindows-based interface to an Objective-C/C++ Cocoa UI while creating a shared business logic layer; most productive engineer across the team. Earlier, brought a wxWindows-based application suite up to shipping quality with large performance improvements and a transition to Carbon Events.
Lead engineer on the HTML editor and core layout teams, completed transition to new editor embedding layer for XUL/JS and C++ applications. One of a team of "super-reviewers": broad-scope experts who review all new source code. "A good (read, tough) code reviewer".
Core member of the Macintosh team over a 4-year period, significant contributor in many areas of the product, particularly the Macintosh graphics and widget libraries. Frequently tackled and fixed hard bugs ranging from QuickDraw port problems to synchronization issues when porting threading and networking code to Mac OS X. "He often focuses on big issues that block us from shipping".
Selected as sole Macintosh representative on a team assembled to measure and improve memory and disk footprint, and runtime performance. Made significant improvements in Macintosh startup and pageload performance (including 20% pageload improvement with a single fix).
Principal engineer on this Gecko-based browser which continues to be recognized for its performance and native look and feel. Implemented many features in a short period of time, and fixed hard plugin compatibility bugs.
Initiated and co-engineered porting of Talkback, a crash reporting application, to Mach-O/Mac OS X. Implementation of low-level signal handling, stack-walking and register dumping code required intimate knowledge of the Mach-O runtime environment.
Developed and maintained build, performance and source code management tools for Macintosh developers, including a complex MacPerl-based Mozilla build system, MacCVS Pro and performance analysis tools. Won acclaim from colleagues for increasing their productivity, and elevating the status of the Mac platform.
Developed and refined the user interface of the Mail & News features on Mac, using C++ and PowerPlant. Made significant interoperability, performance and stability improvements across the product. Winner of Club Excellence award.
Postdoctoral Fellow: Critically analyzed various computer models of ecological and evolutionary systems; developed tools for the visualization of high-dimensional spaces.
Analyzed Echo, a C program which attempts to simulate a complex adaptive system. Demonstrated by extensive data analysis (using sed, awk, perl, gnuplot) and source changes that "interesting" behavior resulted from artifacts of the implementation.
Wrote MacTierra as an independent verification of the claims for the "Tierra" simulation, which creates an evolutionary system within which machine code strings compete for memory and CPU time, which was applauded for its ease of use. Used data from MacTierra to refute previous claims that Tierra shows self-organized criticality.
Developed SpaceTrace, a tool used to visualize high-dimensional spaces, like DNA sequence spaces. Applied it to elucidate output from computer models of evolving sequence populations.
Implemented various tests of graph theory models of sequence-to-structure mappings, and models of evolution on random catalytic networks. Used them to validate and extend analytic results.
Developed this popular Usenet news client with the goal of vastly improved user interactivity through threading, and easier access to news content inline (e.g. reassembly and display of multipart images, movies and sounds). Successfully transitioned an aging codebase to Mac OS X using Carbon APIs. MT-NW remains the most-used non-commercial Macintosh Usenet client.
Created Chronoscope, using C++ and PowerPlant, to fill the gap between instrumenting profilers and timeline tools on Mac OS 9; implemented novel stack view to display graphically program behavior over time, including threads and interrupt-time code. Addressed the sampling overhead problem ignored by other profilers. Used Chronoscope to highlight problematic areas in Mozilla startup code.
Implemented often-requested features and improved usability in this popular PowerPlant-based CVS client. Added support for "patch", allowing Macintosh engineers to apply patches from Windows/Unix for the first time, and SSH1 support, which allowed MacCVS Pro to be used on Sourceforge.
Wrote MacTierra in mixture of Object Pascal and C to create a highly interactive and transparent implementation of the Tierra artificial life system; resolved performance vs. interactivity issues, and Object Pascal runtime bottlenecks.
Wrote many modules for the Macintosh screensaver After Dark demonstrating pattern-formation or simple rule sets which show emergent properties. Buzzz! won an 'honorable mention' in the 1995 Berkley Systems After Dark contest. Recent Mac OS X implementations focus on performance improvements with Altivec and OpenGL.
Demonstrated that insect host-plant shifts onto forestry tree species are relatively common, with a database-driven comparative study of shifting species, field experiments, and genetic analysis of electrophoretic data backed by statistical resampling methods.
Achieved top honours. Courses included Evolution & Taxonomy and Animal Behaviour, covering game theory and population genetics.
For contact details and printable copies of this résumé, please email sfraser@smfr.org