Software developer/manager with 30+ years experience designing and building systems including enterprise-wide procurement systems, scheduling and forecasting tools, database-driven consumer websites, and the database/API to support an iPhone app. I enjoy high-level designing and problem-solving, but also getting my hands dirty in SQL, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, ... My strengths are in backend development and in managing a team to bring a vision to fruition.
Passions: Crafting wicked fast regexes and complex SQL queries
Able to conceive and build all parts of system: Architecture, database, APIs, logic, and front-end.
Love to identify the needs of current and future customers, develop Internet-based products to satisfy them, and guide teams to create them.
My Photoshop and artistic skills are just functional, but I can take a design and implement it in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Design and build all back-end processing for Book2Pod.com (where we convert authors' books into podcasts) and VoCoCraft.com (where we generate audio versions of articles for publishers), using realistic computer-generated voices.
Advise, design, build, optimize, and maintain systems for numerous Internet-based business including the Rehearsal Pro iOS app, VO2GoGo.com, RetailSalesAcademy.com, AuthorMarketingClub.com, Freedback.com, AsktheBuilder.com, and ChicWrap.com.
Publish educational videos, articles, and email newsletter teaching a more mature or newbie audience how to better use their Mac computers.
Created and grew the BestWebBuys.com comparison shopping website (originally BestBookBuys.com), one of the first sites of its kind (launched 1997). Started with simple real-time web page scraping in Perl, evolved to PHP and JSP front-end pages with both Oracle database and Endeca guided search backends, with multiple load-balancing switches to balance web server load and also load across redundant search appliances.
BestBookBuys.com won the 1998 “Coolest Book Site of the Year” Award at the 4th annual Cool Site of the Year Awards in New York City, beating out Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Audio Book Club.
Managed the development of a cross-platform, Internet-based business-to-business communications product (built on Java, Oracle, and Tibco Rendezvous), for the exchange of supply chain information between different applications, systems, and hardware.
Took a wide range of great classes from leading professors, and started writing programs for dynamic web page processing before most people had even heard of the World Wide Web.
Learned large-scale software development skills that I (and the industry) have thankfully replaced with agile, rapid prototyping "Lean Startup" methods. Thankfully also took an algorithms class at Harvey Mudd where everyone wrote a program to play the "Fox and Hounds" board game and the final was a round robin competition. Not only did my code win, but it even beat the professor. Not that I'm competitive or anything.
Learned a ton of biology and chemistry that I now use only in geeky conversations. On the side I took numerous microprocessor classes where I did lots of soldering and assembly language programming.
As a college student, I worked nights and weekends at the first clinical MRI scanner in the world. The technicians would scan patients all day and then I'd manually adjust the brightness and contrast of each scan slice (15-60 per patient), record it to X-ray film and photograph paper, and develop it in the dark room so the radiologists could read the scans the next morning. That's all instantaneous now, but back then it was on a PDP/11 and the hard drives were the size of a large cake!
During summers before, during, and after college, I was a lifeguard at popular lake north of Los Angeles. I watched swim areas, rescued flailing swimmers, performed first aid on beachgoers, and patrolled the lake on a boat to rescue catamarans, ski boats, fishing boats, and Jet Skis. To improve my skills I became an Emergency Medical Technician. Yes, I've performed CPR to bring a dead guy back to life.
Steve Loyola — steve@loyola.net — (626)437-7159