I’ve been programming for the web since 1994, when my friend Eamon and I ran an early NCSA httpd server off our shell accounts at Boston University. I was ostensibly studying psychology (developmental neuroscience) for which I received a BA and MA, but pure research and teaching could not compare to the excitement of the emerging web. Upon graduating I became a web developer at a firm specializing in properties for public radio. Our flagship site was Car Talk, where I was an official cyberbabe.

While everyone I knew was fleeing to California to chase dotcom millions, I stayed in Boston, a city that I love. Eventually I was promoted to engineering manager, moved to the large ad agency Digitas as a project manager and finally came to my senses and finally regained sense and became a senior software engineer at iFactory in 2002. I remained there for six years until 2008 when I made the leap to form my own open source consulting company, threepress.

In addition to programming I keep up a regular writing schedule. I have published two articles for O’Reilly online: Choosing a Language for Interactive Fiction, and Natural Language Game Programming with Inform 7. Interactive fiction has been a life-long interest of mine and I am thrilled that programmers and authors continue to innovate in this niche area of game development. In 1997 I created ifMUD — technically a “multi-user dungeon” but more accurately considered a chat room — as a gathering place for interactive fiction enthusiasts. For more than a decade it has been the nexus of this small but thriving community.

Currently I am an author for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change publishing blog, and I am on the program committee for the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. Additionally I have been a technical editor for several books for O’Reilly including the aptly-named CSS: The Definitive Guide, Python for Linux System Administrators and SQL Alchemy.

In March of 2007 O’Reilly published my ebook Next-Generation Web Frameworks in Python. Although the majority of my paid work has been in Java and my earliest development experience was with Perl, I have found my near-perfect programming language in Python. It is expressive but clean, flexible but readable — qualities I aspire to in writing as well. Because I am not a hardcore computer scientist, I find much to admire in programming languages which adhere closely to human language yet do not sacrifice precision. This is the root of my common interest in Inform 7, Python and XML expression languages such as XPath. (Python is the foundation for the threepress publishing platform.)

XML source content has become my passion and is the focus of my career in the last four years. In 2004 I had the honor of being the lead developer for the Oxford University Press Dictionary of National Biography project. Since then academic publishing has been my area of expertise.

As a freelance consultant I am strongly interested in working with publishers to find flexible, scalable, inexpensive solutions to content creation, management and distribution.

I also have an adorable greyhound and a fiancé who wrote the greatest video game of the 21st century.