Jay Bobzin

Disambiguation.

I've spent most of the last decade programming Java, but if you're looking for "a Java programmer," you're probably in the wrong place. If you're looking for "a guy that loves building great software," you're probably in the right place.

I'm a jack of all trades, master of a few, but it is my belief that learning and writing code is easy. The challenge in building software comes in understanding a host of subtle tradeoffs. Should we use the hot new technology, or the proven incumbent? Should we spend a month desiging the ideal solution, or a week pushing out a solution that works? How resiliant, flexible, or reliable does our application need to be, and what are the challenges inherent to its problem? How much should I build what the client is asking for, and how much should I build what the client really wants? These are the (type of) questions that make building software hard, and so they are the ones I am most interested in answering.

I'm currently working on a very cool project with Charles River Analytics in Cambridge, MA, developing software to enable non-violent solutions to our nation's security problems. Lately, we've been working with Rails, running on JRuby and JBoss using the Torquebox platform, as well as a fairly rich UI built on BackboneJS. Charles River Analytics is a great place to work, and often hiring multi-talented hackers or (computer | information | cognitive) scientists.

I've also consulted for "one of the big five... oops now two" Wall St Broker-Dealers. I had the lovely chore of diving into their 30 year old tangle of mainframe modules in order to develop Java solutions that would run on their new fleet of much cheaper linux boxes. The primary challenge here was working with Operations to understand the purpose of the business logic buried in the mainframe modules.

I'm going to be relocating to the Washington DC / northern VA area in the next few months, and am looking for programming work.

I'm particularly intested in learning Android at the moment, and would definitely welcome an opportunity to master this platform. I also have an ongoing interest in web application architecture, rich javascript / HTML5 interfaces, and NoSql datastores. So any of these things are a bonus in my eyes.

If you want to hear more, drop me a line!