work.md 1.5 KB
title: Me, Professionally date: 2016-07-26 modified: 2024-12-04 author: john melesky
category: about
You want to work with me, and that's great! I'm available for both part-time and full-time work as a leader or IC, and am currently located in Portland, OR, USA. Here's my resume, and some more background on me:
I've been in the industry since before the dot-com boom of the late nineties (I almost said "late twentieth century" there, but that makes me sound much older than I'd like to be).
I have a long history of working with large, often unstructured data, starting with the set of member pages at Tripod.com. I have a background in machine learning, mostly around document classification, though I'm a quite behind the current state of the art at this point. I've written a number of reporting systems, and am comfortable enough with databases that I spent a few years working as a DBA.
Nowadays, although I have capable technical chops, my strengths lie in leadership. In particular, I enjoy growing groups of individuals into high-performance teams. My leadership approach is focused on empathy and open communication, and values retention, teamwork, and growth of capacity over growth of team size.
I'm not an academic, but I pay attention to academic research, and there's quite a bit of interesting stuff that has come out over the past few years around software development. The "developer thriving" framework has transformed how I think about teams and teambuilding.