Dev Imperium

Not that I’m terribly exciting but you’re here so…

I’m Joby Walker (really Joseph B. Walker… get it Joe B…well my parents thought it was cleaver). Let’s see some basic History… I grew up in Redmond, Washington and graduated from Redmond High School in 1991. I then attended the University of Washington until 1996 when I left with a BA in History. Shortly thereafter I started working for a local guardianship non-profit, Care Planning Associates, where I worked until 1998. Until 2000, I worked at another non-profit, the Alliance for Education. And in March of 2001 I stared working for the Software Support Group of the University of Washington’s Computing and Communications (now rebranded UW Technology), where remain.

My primary employment and hobby is web application development. I generally prefer to work in PHP, though I have been forced to endure developing for and supporting RequestTracker (a Perl webapp). Late in 2005, I discovered Symfony — a PHP5 framework — and have been using it as a basis of my web applications since (though because of RequestTracker, I haven’t had much time for other applications). My current projects are:

1) RequestTracker (Perl/Work): a generic trouble ticketing solution. I am now an emeritus member of the project with other responsibilities.

2) Lima (PHP-Symfony/Work): a repository for mail flagged as potentially spam to allow for easy and quick discrimination between valid and invalid mail. Largely Complete.
3) SCManage/Viduus (PHP/Work): Two applications using a primitive framework I developed, that simplify using Subversion as the canonical store of data for a web application. They allow us to easily tag a branch for release and push it to the production webservers. Largely Complete.
4) Spellbook (PHP-Symfony/Personal): Playing a wizard in D&D is a pain in the ass with all of the spells and info you need to manage. I’m also getting tired of carrying half a dozen hardback books with me. So Spellbook will be a resource for me and my friends to store spell information and manage spell lists. It is largely functional, and development has stopped. With the upcoming release of D&D 4th Edition in June, I’m not going to work on the project until I see if it will be necessary…

5) Ymir (PHP-Symfony/Work): This is what I work on mostly at work (and some at home). This is a web interface (UI and API) to manage server information for UW Technology (formerly UW Computing and Communications). It will be one key element in our effort to eliminate the use of Remedy ARS.