I could give you my bio but that might be boring. Short version of my roots is F77, C, C++, Visualworks, Java, ObjectiveC, Squeak. I like Smalltalk best and wish I had those hours doing C++ and Java back.
I think Squeak is a fascinating platform with tremendous potential. However, I think the overall quality of the platform is hindering new development. There is a lot of stuff that 'mostly' works but the last 10% of the work to make it production ready (that part that takes the other 50% of the time) hasn't been done.
The things I'll be pushing are platform stability, modularity, some consideration of backwards compatibility, and opportunities for use in commercial developments. If I have a single talent in the software world, it is probably in spotting synergies and exploiting them. If you look at my open source projects, they are mostly glue. :-)
My philosophy is that money is the driver for improving the platform and is the best way to get Squeak to evolve is to use it to build useful things.
This does not mean I do not support educational or experimental use. I think these areas will also benefit from a more solid platform and, as an occasional part time college professor, I am strongly pro-education.
My adventures with Squeak include:
http://badpage.net is an HTML/CSS checker written while I was manager of Javascript platform team at amazon.com. It is largely responsible for Amazon's leap in HTML quality a year ago. I wrote it over a few weekends and I don't think I would have been able to do it at all in another language given the same time constraints.
Bricks: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3186 was a project I began to refactor Morphic and make it more amenable to direct manipulation and visual construction. I ran out of resources but I learned a lot about Morphic and am well aware of its weaknesses in detail.
ObjectiveC bridge ( you know - glue). My introduction to the VM and semaphores. Yet another project that 'mostly works'. Given that my cash flow relies on web applications, I don't have the resources to work on UI projects.
So I think I've got some familiarity on the state of various parts of squeak.
Announcement email follows
I'm announcing my candidacy for squeak foundation board.
I currently derive all of my income from Seaside application development working out of my home.
I have taken over maintenance of the GLORP port and am working with Alan Knight to make it every bit as slick as Rails for doing automatic schema migrations. For Squeak, I've added connection pooling and basic schema migration.
I was previously the manager of Amazon.com's AJAX applications team and used Squeak to build an HTML/CSS validator to cut Amazon's error count from an average of 13 mismatched or unclosed tags to about one per page during 2005/2006. http://badpage.net
I blog about stuff I care about at http://blackbagops.net
I would like to accomplish:
1) Reconciliation between the two very different goals of research and production ready system. Both are important.
2) Work for funding for purpose of bounties/stipends for core facilities that will benefit the core platform.
3) Improve relations/communication among the various forks of squeak.
4) Raise awareness of Squeak as a serious open source platform for application development.
