Bill Kendrick

Objective

I am not looking for employment at this time. Thank you for your interest.

Experience

6/2008-present

Smashwords (www.smashwords.com), Los Gatos, California
eBook publishing
CTO and Developer

Took over maintenance and enhancement of a website which allows self-publishing of commercial and free electronic books. Added various social networking elements (favorite author lists, automatic blog feed fetching). Added support for folksonomic tags. Extended the system to support publishers and publisher vs. author rights management. Created a coupon system and site-wide promotion tool. Implemented a highly flexible affiliate system. Created various reporting tools for authors/publishers as well as those used internally. Implemented a RESTful API using HTTP and XML that third parties can use to query ebook metadata. Created an ATOM-based XML feed for accessing Smashwords within Lexcycle's Stanza ebook reader for iPhone. Created an iPhone-optimized version of major parts of the website. Implemented search engine optimizations (SEO) to improve discovery of content. Enhanced the ebook format conversion tool and search index update backend to run as serial queues, to enhance overall site stability and response.

3/2006-6/2008

LimeLife, Inc. (www.limelife.com), Menlo Park, California
Mobile content for women
Software Application Engineer

Lead designer and developer of a web-based "content widget" which pulls stories and photos from a WAP site's RSS feed and delivers them as interactive HTML content, deployed by widget enablers such as ClearSpring and WidgetBox. Includes facilities for connecting to back-end servers to send story links to mobile phones as SMS TXT messages and for signing up for mobile alerts. Utilizes CSS and JavaScript to constrain content within widget dimensions, and to provide collapsable/expandable text and image zooming.

Note: My first two years at LimeLife were focused on mobile game and application development in J2ME and BREW; in early 2008 the company's focus changed to web, WAP and widget content.

11/2003-3/2006

Penultimate Inc. (www.penultimate.com), Palo Alto, California
Game software for cellphones
Senior Software Engineer

Co-designed and developed multiplayer turn-based games utilizing application-directed SMS text messaging and a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server backend (AirChess and Word Nerd). Helped maintain the company's website.

Note: My main focus while at Penultimate was mobile game development in BREW.

6/2003-11/2003

NerdBooks.com (www.nerdbooks.com), Roseville, California
Book retailer
Developer

Designed and developed a number of back-end reporting tools using MySQL, PHP and Perl on Linux. Handled integration of raw data sent from book publishers by creating automated tools that parsed incoming CSV files uploaded to the store's private FTP server.

12/1998-Present

Bill's Games (www.billsgames.com), Mountain View, California
Web-based games
Owner, Lead programmer, Webmaster

Designed and developed numerous CGI-based games written in C. Receives over 5000 visitors and 10 million pagehits per month. Site has been reviewed in numerous books, magazines and newspapers, and has received a number of awards. Created a solitaire game as a stand-alone HTTPD server that utilizes 'mmap' to dump game state to disk when the server needs updating or restarting, to provide seamless gameplay for visitors. Site is known for it's compatibility with WebTV/MSNTV and other non-traditional browsers.

1/1999-Present

Linux Users' Group of Davis (www.lugod.org), Davis, California
Non-profit computer club
Co-founder, webmaster

Co-designed, developed the software for, and maintain the club's comprehensive website. Maintenance of the site is simplified by use of numerous homebrew PHP functions. Site includes an RSS-based newsfeed, searchable member listing, and filterable archive of links to external news articles.

8/2000-2/2003

MCI/Worldcom, Sacramento, California
Telecommunications; licensing division
Web developer

Maintain a number of internal and customer websites. Co-developed a Perl-based system for automated creation of printable PDF forms, labels and hunting/fishing licenses using LaTeX templates and an Oracle database backend.

2/2000-6/2001

Davis Game Design Club, Davis, California
Computer and game club
Co-founder, webmaster

Designed, developed the software for, and maintained the club's comprehensive website, including upcoming events, photos and meeting minutes of past events, and a gallery of artwork and screenshots from other club members.

6/1998-9/1999

Wine Society of the World, Kansas City, Missouri
Retail website
Lead programmer, Webmaster

Developed a wine news and retail site.

8/1996-5/1999

STERBA Online (www.sterba.com), Rohnert Park, California
Community web portal
Lead programmer, Web designer

Developed and co-designed a community portal website, including business search engine, online events calendar, web-based music jukebox, realtime web-based chat application, and web-based forum (bulletin board system (BBS)). Integrated search, jukebox and events systems. Helped create a number of client business' websites.

8/1997-6/1998

Sonoma County Administration Center, Santa Rosa, California
Sheriff Department Information Technology
Web designer, Instructor

Designed and built internal website using FrontPage. Converted numerous WordPerfect and WANG documents to HTML. Trained coworkers on building and maintaining new documents.

3/1995-8/1997

Smart Wine, Sonoma, California
Online magazine; Product reviews
Lead programmer, Web designer

Developed and co-designed a wine search engine and recommendation system. Designed and developed a realtime web-based chat application. Helped design and maintain major sections of the magazine website.

Skills

Server Operating Systems

Linux (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu) (9 years), Solaris/SunOS (4 years)

Programming and Scripting Languages

C (14 years), Shell scripting (8 years), PHP (8 years), Perl (2 years), CodeIgniter (< 1 year)

Databases

MySQL (4 years), phpMyAdmin (<1 year),

Software Development and Project Management Tools

GNU Make, CVS, SVN, SourceForge, Trac, TestTrack Pro, MediaWiki, Doxygen, Visual Source Safe (and Source OffSite)

Graphics Manipulation

The Gimp (9 years)
ImageMagick and other server-side graphics tools

Education

6/1998

Sonoma State University (www.sonoma.edu), Rohnert Park, California
B.S., Computer Science, with Distinction

Affiliations

1/1999-Present

Linux Users' Group of Davis (www.lugod.org)
Co-founder, active officer

References

Available upon request.
(Also see my LinkedIn Profile (linkedin.com/in/billkendrick) for various recommendations.)

Last updated: May 2009