- Name: Léon Brocard
- Address: 39A Chepstow Road, London, W2 5BP, UK
- Email: leon@astray.com
- Web: www.astray.com
- Date of birth: 26th February 1976
- Aim: Rapid Development Leader
Work Experience
- November 2007-Present - Working as a "Technical Director" at
mrmonkey.
- October 2005-October 2007 - Working as a "Senior Web Developer" at
Foxtons.
Rearchitected the import system with ETL principles,
created vodcasts automatically,
converted SVG floorplans to Flash by writing a PDF interpreter
and programmatially created weekly flyers in PDF.
- October 2001-October 2004 - Working as a "Senior Perl Developer" and then
"Backend Team Manager" at
Fotango, a Canon subsidiary.
Lead developer of Fotango's largest project,
CANON iMAGE GATEWAY,
a pan-European online photo sharing site. Led a 5-person team improving the codebase,
rapidly adding new features and tuning performance
- February 2001-September 2001 - Various small Perl consulting jobs in London
- October 2000-January 2001 - Working as a "Senior Developer" at
Emap Online, developing
backends to holiday booking systems and location-based services
- March 2000-September 2000 - Working as a "Perl Programmer" at
Interactive Investor, working
on news feeds (including conversion to HTML of freeform stock exchange news)
and discussion boards
- August 1998-January 1999 - Worked as a contractor for
Elsevier Science
in Amsterdam, building a SGML-based academic journal web publishing
system using Apache, Perl and mod_perl. Added features and improved performance
- March 1998-January 2000 - Worked at
Netcraft
(a security consultancy) as
a Perl developer,
including data munging, XML, database development and penetration testing.
Led the development of Netcraft's
"What's that site running?"
service, which passively detects a webserver's operating system from
TCP/IP networking characteristics
- October 1997-November 1997 - Worked at
Blueberry
(an old / new media company), as general CGI and HTML joe, including work on
the Design Council website
- October 1996-Easter 1997 - Worked part time as a CGI consultant to
Poppy Tyson Interactive (a new media company),
including producing live results for the 1997 Million Dollar Golf championship
- Summer 1996 - Worked as the main programmer at Intelifest, a
small Soho-based Internet marketing company. Primarily Perl and Java work,
and produced real-time results for the 1996 British Open Golf
Championship
Education
Additional information
- Currently Perl Pumpkin
for Perl 5.005.
I am in charge of maintaining a stable version of Perl, making sure it
builds under modern operating systems, with modern libraries and
coordinating releases
- Speaker at many Perl and Open Source conferences:
YAPC::Europe 2000-2007,
German Perl Workshop 2001-2003,
YAPC::Taipei 2005,
O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2001-2003, 2005,
JOIN 2003,
Scandinavian Perl Workshop 2004,2007
YAPC::Asia 2006
- Author of
many modules
on the CPAN. Highlights:
Data::Page
(help when paging through results),
Devel::ebug
(a simple, extensible Perl debugger),
GraphViz
(a simple interface to a graph layout tool),
Net::DPAP::Client
(connect to iPhoto shares via DPAP),
PPI::Metric::Basic
(provide basic software metrics),
WWW::Search::Google
(search Google via SOAP)
- Founder of the
Amsterdam.pm and
Bath.pm Perl Monger
groups. Active member of
London.pm
- Instigator and organiser for
yapc::Europe,
the first European Perl Conference, where 300 people enjoyed
two tracks
at this three-day conference in central London in 2000
- Instigator and organiser for the
London Perl Workshop,
where 250 people enjoyed
two tracks concentrated on Practical Perl
at this one-day workshop in central London in 2004
- Prize Winner of the 2004 Entrepreneurs Challenge, Tanaka Business School,
Imperial College London
- Inventor of "Website localisation", UK Patent GB2403306
- Technical reviewer for Damian Conway's
Object Oriented Perl,
Dave Cross'
Data Munging with Perl,
and
mod_perl Developer's Cookbook
by Geoffrey Young, Paul Lindner and Randy Kobes
- Recipient of a
White Camel Award
in 2001
for my work in Perl advocacy
- Maintainer of CPAN Testers
web site, which provides quality and testing information for CPAN modules
- Summariser for several weekly Perl 5 and Perl 6 development
summaries
-
As a gastronome, my favourite restaurant is
St. John in Smithfields.
I provide over
180,000 recipes on my website,
by parsing partially-organised information and indexing for high
performance
- I like diving (I am a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor, #635739), snowboarding and anything which is
orange
By Léon Brocard / Last updated May 2007
