KevinFink

From SPUG

I started using Perl when I was responsible for compiling each new release (starting with version 2.001 or thereabouts) on my college's SunOS, HPUX, Dynix, and HyperCube machines in the late '80s. As a sysadmin I quickly grew to know and love Perl's help in banging out scripts to solve various annoying administrative problems. Even now I write Perl scripts to balance my checkbook (including parsing OFX files from Bank of America's website and categorizing expenses based on pattern-matching and historical categorizations), cheat at online games (it's so much easier to come up with good Scrabble or Boggle words with a little help from Perl and /usr/dict/words...), and otherwise improve the quality of my life.

I recently left my position of CTO (Chief Technology Officer) / Senior Vice President Engineering at WhitePages.com (http://www.whitepages.com/), a Seattle-based Internet company focused on providing People Search services online. I didn't do a lot of Perl programming there, but did contribute to a number of production projects as well as building a lot of prototypes of various features.

I am currently looking for my next great opportunity, probably as the CTO of a young (5-25 employee) technology company doing something related to the Internet and having a strong data-related flavor.

Prior to the four years I spent at WhitePages, I did a brief stint as Director of Engineering at DataChannel (and then Netegrity, after we were acquired). DataChannel was a Java shop, but I still managed to use Perl a fair bit - mostly tools for code and documentation builds.

Before that I spent about six years as co-founder and CTO of N2H2, Inc. - another Seattle-based Internet startup. There I did everything from a lot of coding (largely in Perl, although I also wrote a fair bit of C) to QA to Tech Support to R&D to Technical Management.