William Light

http://williamlight.net/
resume@wrl.illest.net
Berlin, DE

After growing up in the Midwestern USA, I moved to the West coast to pursue my passion for developing efficient, usable software and writing electronic music. An autodidact by nature, I am always learning and adapting, constantly honing my craft.

I am fascinated by the inner workings and underpinnings of software and am looking for opportunities that let me work "close to the metal."

Skills

C, POSIX/Unix APIs, libudev, IOKitLib, Bonjour, JACK, OpenGL, Xlib/XCB, cSound, Python, Django, SQL, Javascript, HTML/CSS, Actionscript 3, Flex, PHP, Git

I have an approachable and easygoing personality, am good at explaining technical concepts in easy to understand terms, and learn new languages and APIs quickly.

Experience

• Lead Software Engineer company name TBD (11.2012 - current)

  • Bootstrapping a music technology start-up
  • Responsible for architecture and implementation of a music composition environment, inclusive both of audio/DSP code and graphical user interface.

• Contract Software Engineer Monome (03.2011 - ongoing maintenance)

  • Ported my existing libmonome project (originally developed for Linux) to Windows and Mac OS X
  • Developed serialosc, a cross-platform serial-to-OpenSoundControl server leveraging my existing work on libmonome.
  • Implemented the host-side serial protocol for communicating with the new grid and arc devices
  • Built installers and distribution packages for the finished product

• Software Engineer Native Instruments (04.2012 - 06.2012)

  • Diagnosed rendering inefficiencies in QT on an embedded Linux platform
  • Designed protocols for communication between a USB gadget and the host system

• Contract Software Engineer Soundcloud (06.2011 - 03.2012)

  • Developed a test harness for acoustic fingerprinting systems
  • Implemented an audio classification algorithm for differentiating between music and speech signals

• Software Engineer Twilio Inc. (10.2010 - 03.2011)

  • Developed graphing components in Javascript
  • Reverse-engineered Adobe's RTMP streaming media protocol and developed an implementation as a FreeSWITCH endpoint module

• Software Developer Scrapblog Inc. (04.2010 - 10.2010)

  • Developed an E-Commerce system in Python, interfacing with APIs from Authorize.net, USPS, FedEx, and others
  • Part of a team developing a Facebook application for creating photo collages

• Software Developer NeuralIQ Inc. (08.2007 - 10.2008)

  • Ported an Actionscript 2 application to AS3/Flex
  • Patched bugs in Adobe Flex 2
  • Developed a VT100 terminal emulator in AS3
  • Developed interactive Flex visualization components

• Contract Web Developer Avanoo (06.2007 - 08.2007)

  • Developed embeddable widgets both with Javascript and OpenLaszlo

• Web Developer The Next Wave (12.2006 - 05.2007)

  • Maintained Wordpress sites for clients
  • Developed custom PHP/MySQL sites
  • Developed a captive WiFi portal based on NoCatAuth, OpenBSD, and PHP
  • Worked as server administrator and technical support for a small, in-house hosting service

• Technician Midwest Design Computers (01.2006 - 01.2007)

  • Performed general repair work on customers' computers
  • Built custom digital video recorders for an affiliated surveillance company
  • Built and configured a router/firewall with OpenBSD and pf

Personal Projects

• My personal projects focus on the intersection between music and software, exploring new ways of computer-based performance and composition.

  • Developed libmonome, which provides an easy to use API for the Monome human interface devices.

  • Developed rove, a program for live improvisation and performance of electronic music. Over the course of development, I have used rove to perform my music at a number of shows, including several I played while on tour in the western U.S.