Software Engineer Project

Abe Fettig

Hi, I'm Abe Fettig, and I build web applications. This is

my professional resume.

What I do

I design and build apps that run in web browsers, with interfaces built in

HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I've been doing this

since 1999, more than ten years. Along the way

I've acquired an extensive collection of

real-world bugs, workarounds, and performance tricks that help

me push the limits of what a cross-browser web app can do.

For my own projects I generally use the Python

programming language. I have a strong working knowledge of the

Django web development framework, and the

Twisted framework for building networked applications.

I'm also experienced in implementing and debugging the standard formats

and protocols used for internet communications, including

I like working with technology, but I care more about people.

I look at my technical knowledge as just a

means to build products that people will enjoy using. My goal is

to make applications that delight users instead of

frustrate them. And when I'm working on a project with other

people, I try to treat them with kindness and respect.

Experience

From 2006 to 2010 I was employed as a software engineer for

.

At Google I worked on, a product

that lets any person or team create and publish a good-looking,

organized website using only a web browser. Much of my work was

on the Sites WYSIWYG HTML editor, which is implemented in

Javascript. I also made some contributions to shared Javascript

libraries used inside Google, including

an interesting piece of

code (now open sourced) which can be used to generate

a set of CSS rules that make an iframe appear to inherit

the styles of its containing element.

From 2004 to 2006 I worked at, a startup that built and sold the JotSpot wiki product (JotSpot was acquired by Google in November 2006).

At JotSpot I worked on a number of projects, including rewriting

our templates to be based on structural markup and CSS layouts,

improving our suite of Wiki-based applications, and developing a

plugin system for extending the wiki.

While at JotSpot I developed a new product,, a web

application that allowed multiple users to take notes collaboratively

in real time. JotSpot Live used the JotSpot wiki server to store page

data and a Twisted web server to push changes to the browser using

XMLHttpRequest long-polling. (Soon after the release of

JotSpot Live, JotSpot's Alex Russell

""

to describe this kind of technique.)

During the year before JotSpot was acquired,

I took over development of the JotSpot WYSIWYG editor, which included

contributing speed and usability improvements to the

open source Dojo RichText widget. I was able to greatly improve

the JotSpot editing experience, making in-page Ajax editing

fast, stable, and seamless. At the 2006 Ajax Experience Boston

conference I gave a talk entitled

"", in which I

shared some of what I'd learned about browser-based editing.

Between 2002 and 2006 I developed Hep Message Server, which I released

as open source software. Hep was a communications

server that offered storage transfer of email and RSS messages while

also proxying between RSS, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, NNTP, and weblog APIs.

This allowed users to do things like read their RSS feeds using

their email client over IMAP. Hep was implemented using Python and the

Twisted framework. Along with Hep I also released a library called Yarn,

which provided a standard Python API for reading and writing messages

using many different formats and protocols. I gave

at PyCon 2005 in Washington, DC.

In 2005 my book on working with network protocols in Twisted,, was published by O'Reilly.

From 2002 to 2005 I worked as a programmer at Diversified

Business Communications in Portland, Maine. During that

time I was responsible for designing and building several major new

pieces of software, including a system for syncing data between

internal databases and the web, a company intranet, and a data

warehouse that merged customer data from several different sources

and made it available for reporting and analysis.

From 1999 to 2002 I worked as a contractor doing custom software

development, including a number of web-based applications backed

by SQL databases.

In 1999, while attending Southern Maine Technical College, a friend

and I developed Happymail, a prototype web-based email system.

Unlike other web email products at the time, Happymail used

Javascript and hidden

frames to send data between the client and server, so it didn't

require a full page refresh every time you wanted to check your mail

or open a message. (Since then, of course, Ajax techniques have

become widely adopted, but at the time

we'd never seen anything like this done before.)

Hire me

I'm available for hire on a contract, hourly basis (depending on

my current projects and schedule).

If you have an interesting project that you'd like to hire me to

work on,

I'd love to talk about it. You can reach

me by email at ***@******.***.

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