Jon Shemitz - resume

I have a quarter century's experience as a programmer and an author. I'm good at organizing information so that you can grasp it without being overwhelmed, and so that it's easy to find particular bits. This is the key skill that links everything I do: it's a skill that's as useful in user interface design as it is in writing books or in building websites.

I write clear code. Simple, maintainable code. And I write it comparatively quickly, at least partly because I program very defensively. I build firewalls to limit the scope of any mistakes, and I do unit testing, to catch mistakes before I move on. I also learned long ago to favor simplicity over raw speed, because it's always easier to speed up simple code than to debug fast code.

I've worked in C# since 2002 (including a script language compiler and a couple of contracts) but I programmed in Borland Pascal for nearly twenty years, since Turbo Pascal 1.0. I wrote and sold my own consumer-oriented software for a number of years after leaving a corporate job, but since 1994 I've done consulting and contract programming. Mostly C#, these days, but I still remember Delphi.

My second book, a Delphi programmers' introduction to .NET 2.0, came out in June, 2006 - it's gotten great reviews, and is selling nicely. My Kylix book came out in 2001, and I've had dozens of magazine articles and book chapters published - I've even been flown to London to speak.

I've got nearly five years of deep .NET experience, from 1.0 through 2.0 - though still virtually no ASP.NET - and have years of Windows experience from 3.0 on up. I have a fair amount of experience programming Linux at both the Libc and scripting level, as well as significant experience with regexes, XSLT, COM and ActiveX, as well as SQL. I spent years programming primarily in Delphi and Turbo Pascal, but my C++ is good enough to have published a couple of C++ articles. I'm also pretty decent with assembly and Perl, as well as with JavaScript and CSS.

Be sure to read the Recent Work
and Work History pages of this resume.