My name is Tim and I’ll be a part of the Dancing Mammoth team for the summer. During the school year I’m a PhD student in computer science at Princeton, working with these fine folks. Princeton keeps us pretty busy during the school year, but during the summer, they turn us loose and force us to fend for ourselves in the “real world.”
I’ve been doing web development on and off for more than a decade. During college, I was the webmaster of the University of Minnesota’s computer science department, where I developed a variety of web applications and gave our department website a fresh new look (recently replaced by an even fresher, newer look). I got lots of practice with Apache, Perl, JavaScript, MySQL, and the usual alphabet soup of three- and four-letter acronyms. More recently, I’ve gotten into web development using Python and the Django framework.
After college, I worked as a journalist, blogger, and policy analyst, writing for Ars Technica, the New York Times, Slate, the Cato Institute, and various other places. Writing prose is fun, but after a few years I started to miss writing code and decided to go back to grad school.
For years, PJ has provided web design and hosting services to a number of my favorite blogs (including one I contribute to), magazines, and non-profits and I’ve always been impressed by his minimalist design sense and bulletproof hosting methodology. So I was excited when he invited me to join the team for the summer. I’m expecting to learn a lot about web development while helping clients solve their problems.