reginald braithwaite

recent

• My résumé, (last updated January 2010). And a recent letter of reference.
• I gave an opening day keynote talk on Beautiful Failure at CUSEC in January, 2010.
• I spoke at Microsoft Tech Days Toronto and also a talk on Revised.revised(Ruby.rewrite(Ruby)) at Stackoverflow’s Dev Days Toronto. There were positive reviews:
  • Three notable talks were those given by Joel Spolsky (co-founder of StackOveflow), Greg Wilson (Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of Toronto), and Reginald Braithwaite (Software Developer and Development Manager).
  • Reg Braithwaite gave a great talk... I've followed some of his projects (from a distance) in the past without realizing that he was involved. He is brilliant.
  • Reg was a great speaker and obviously knew a lot about the topic... I love "Thinking about Thinking about Programming". That quote is something that stuck in my head even now a couple days after the talk.
  • I am sure Reginald Braithwaite's talk on metalinguistic programming got some people in the audience to rethink their thinking about thinking about thinking about programming. The entire presentation was written in Ruby syntax, which was very very cool.
• Werner Schuster interviewed me.
• Ruby.rewrite(Ruby), my presentation at RubyFringe that inspired Revised.revised(Ruby.rewrite(Ruby)).

career

I am a software developer and development manager with more than twenty years of professional experience. I work as a development lead, architect, and/or senior developer on a contract basis. I also consult and deliver buzzword-free workshops on software development for teams. I recently led a team developing and maintaining the on-line service offering—in partnership with an internal team—of one of the world’s largest financial organizations. I also speak at users’ group meetings and conferences like RubyFringe and MeshU. I have delivered software development training, development management training, and sales training.

I work with Ruby, Rails, and Java.

I have also created a hugely successful software development tool suite, JProbe, in an Independent Software Vendor (“ISV”) environment. I have also created business software, both Enterprise Class Software (with 3,000,000+ external users) and Software that Powers the Enterprise (200 – 2,000 internal users). I have led teams from three to twenty-three in size. I have also been a top major accounts sales executive and also held positions as a marketing manager and copywriter.

get it in writing

I write code and words about code in homoiconic (here’s a chronological list of posts). It’s a specialty un-blog for programmers who are interested in how and why and not just what. Prior to homoiconic, I wrote raganwald a popular weblog about passionate programming. My friendfeed is useful if you want a great deal of detail.

technology experience

In addition to working on Rails and Java applications scaling out to millions of users, I have developed several metaprogramming extensions for the Ruby programming language, including rewrite_rails—a Ruby on Rails plugin that extends the Ruby programming language with features like Extension Methods and Bloack Anaphora without monkey-patching, the standalone andand gem, and the Invocation Construction Kit, a gem that provides programmable evaluation semantics.

I have spent most of my career creating cross-platform (and recently cross-browser) software for Unix, Macintosh, and Windows systems, not to mention MS-DOS, CP/M and MP/M. My professional programming experience includes work with Ruby, Java, C/C++, Scheme, JavaScript, SQL, Pascal, and Basic. I have developed web applications, stand-alone desktop applications, client-server applications, and multi-user terminal applications. I have worked with J2EE, Ruby on Rails, and various OS toolboxes/APIs.

My technical speciality is developing infrastructure (such as domain-specific or embedded languages, testing frameworks, macros, and libraries) to accelerate development and ease maintenance/reengineering. This technical approach integrates strongly with my iterative development experience.

interests

My long-time research interest was applying statistical analysis of empirical data to predicting the outcome of software development projects. I am currently on hiatus from thinking about developing software more effectively in order to focus on actually developing software most effectively.

I am a lifelong cyclist, I'm an avid rock climber and and scuba diver. I am interested in Math, Logic, and solving puzzles. Raymond Smullyan is my favourite non-fiction author.

Stop by flickr.com for entirely irrelevant snapshots of my life offline.

If you are into social networking, I’m on facebook.

contact

For email, most people call me reg, and you know that this page is hosted at braythwayt.com.

the answer to an infrequently asked question

Raganwald is my own made-up variation on the Norse name Ragnvald, which is the origin of the Norman name Reginald (it actually goes back to Sanskrit, so it is loosely related to the Indian name Raj). Braythwayt is a very rare spelling for my surname.

(I first encountered “Braythwayt” in a P.G. Wodehouse short story when the hapless Bingo Little abandons Honoria Glossop to chivvy Daphne Braythwayt about, and Honoria assumes Bertie loves her and accepts what she thinks is his implied proposal… But perhaps you should read the story for yourself.)