Consulting

I am currently available to do consultancy work and am happy to work in any of the areas that I am skilled, time permitting.

Who am I?

As you may have gathered by now, my name is Jonathan. I graduated from the University of Cambridge in June 2006, having studied Computer Science at the Computer Laboratory. I came out of this with a first class honours degree - that is, the highest class. Additionally, I was in the top quarter of those students awarded first class degrees.

I am currently out of the academic world, enjoying traveling the world and hacking on open source software. To enable that (especially the first of them, which is an expensive hobby) I'm making my skills and brain power available to interested parties in return for money.

What can I do?

My areas of interest include compilers, virtual machines, programming language design and type systems. I can take on projects in these fields. I am also experienced in server side web development, and have implemented and/or overseen numerous projects of this kind. Please note that I am not a designer, can not provide hosting and so on - I just do the programming part. Of course, if you're looking for functional rather than super-pretty, I can whip up something that is usable.

If you are looking for a list of technologies I've a clue about, here goes.

• Perl Programming: I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of Perl. I've taught Perl. I've attended and spoken at international Perl conferences. I've written Perl modules. I'm involved in the development of Perl 6. I know Perl, present and future, very well.
• C# and .Net: I've written C# professionally. I understand the new features introduced in C# 2.0 and C# 3.0, and have written articles to explain them to others. I've worked a lot in ASP.Net and done the odd WinForms app here and there too. Unlike your average .Net developer, I also know a lot about the underlying runtime engine. I implemented the .Net bytecode to Parrot bytecode translator, meaning that I've dealt with and understand .Net IL (Intermediate Language).
• C Programming: I've written C in open source projects, including one high-profile one (the Parrot virtual machine). I really understand pointers (and function pointers too), am aware of what is not portable (endian and word size stuff, not everywhere uses ASCII and so on) and have an idea of what machine code a given bit of C will compile down to, which is sometimes worth knowing.
• Databases: I know SQL. I have worked with both MySQL and SQL server in commercial environments. I've survived MS Access (and know it's not a good idea to do anything big with it). I know how to design a relational database, and what normalization is.
• HTML, XHTML, CSS: I've worked with these plenty in many web related tasks. Check out the XHTML and CSS for this site for an example of what I'm capable of.
• Visual Basic: I wrote a lot of this when I was younger. I've done so once more recently. If you need some old application written in Visual Basic maintaining, I'm happy to take a look. If you want me to write something new in it, I'll tell you for free that it's a Bad Idea. (And no, I'm not talking about VB.Net, which is essentially C# but with syntax that I like much less.)
• Parrot: This is a virtual machine that will run Perl 6 and many other dynamic languages. I'm one of the developers of Parrot; of note I wrote pbc_merge (the Parrot linker), the .Net bytecode to Parrot bytecode translator, the specification for the Parrot bytecode file format and parts of the object model design, which I also contributed heavily to the implementation of.
• Writing And Speaking: I have spoken at international conferences on a range of subjects and written numerous articles. I have received good feedback on both my talks and articles.
• Miscellaneous: I have experience, but don't consider myself an expert, with Apache, Subversion (SVN), basic Linux system administration and Java. Then, you may not need an expert, just an SVN repository setting up or some mod_rewrite rules writing.