TobyCabot - Main - The Caboteria

---+ Toby Cabot

<blockquote>We have begun to pollute and desecrate and cheapen all of our experiences. We are creating neat little life-boxes for everything, all tied up with a geo-tag, a photo, a check-in; our daily existence transformed into database entries in some <nop>NoSQL database on some spinning disk in some rack in suburban Virginia. - [[http://ted.io/the-horrible-future-of-social.html][Ted Nyman]]<small> (more CuteQuotes)</small></blockquote>

Hi! I'm a father, husband, programmer, systems engineer, technical architect, and motorcycle rider who lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

I volunteer some of my free time to the [[http://www.gnu.org/][GNU Project]]. I'm a Volunteer Coordinator, which means that I try to help people who are helping the GNU project. If you don't know about Free Software I'd strongly recommend that you check out their web site. I don't have a lot of time to give them, but I'm glad to help.

I've also been mentoring a kid through https://codepath.org .  It's fun chatting with someone who's just starting out in the industry, and hopefully I'll be able to help her avoid a few of the many career mistakes that I've made.

---++ Resume

Here's my [[http://www.caboteria.org/~tobyc/resume.html][resume]], and my resume in [[http://www.caboteria.org/~tobyc/resume.pdf][PDF format]]. Note to recruiters: the online copy of my resume at this site is authoritative. Please do *not* ask me to send you a copy in Word format.

---++ Informal Resume

At work I'm a software architect and developer specializing in the design and development of large-scale systems written in Ruby and Java (they work great together!), although I've also built ASP/VBScript systems, and done lots of work in C.

I work for [[http://www.affectiva.com/][Affectiva]], a Media Lab spin-off with a technology that can measure people's emotions from their facial expressions.

Before that I worked for [[http://www.mitre.org/][The MITRE Corporation]] on healthcare-related systems, mostly open source, for example: http://www.healthit.gov/PDMP and http://projectpophealth.org/.

Before that I worked for Sermo in Kendall Square, helping build and run their web site. Sermo was a crazy place; a small capsule of late-90's dot-com irrational exuberance transported ten years into the future. It was fun while it lasted...

Before that I worked for Reva Systems, a startup building RFID infrastructure. Great idea, great people, great product, plenty of funds. It's a damn shame it didn't work out.

Before that I bounced around for a while, doing software architecture and development consulting.

Before that I was the CTO of a small software company in Kendall Square called Black Ink Systems. It was a fun place to work; building real-time financial analytics software for communications carriers. My job was to design things, write good code, and in general try to share some of my experience with the development team.

Before Black Ink I was the CTO and co-founder of a software startup called <nop>SaltFire which built financial transaction processing infrastructure for communications carriers. Starting a company was a very intense experience and while the company wasn't successful I'm glad that I took the leap. I learned a lot and met some very cool people.

Before <nop>SaltFire I worked for <a href="http://www.kenan.com/">Kenan Systems</a> as a director in the software development group, at various times in charge of architecture, development, and performance groups (even the IT group for a while). We were a wild little independent software company until the founder sold out to <a href="http://www.lucent.com/">Lucent</a> in early '99. "Welcome to the Bell System, employee number 156,892. Please see the nurse for your implant." Working for the phone company (or at least one of the fragments of it) was interesting but it reinforced my belief that small companies are where it's at. Given that there's really no better job security at a place like Lucent than at a startup there's not a lot to recommend working there.

Before that I lived in Rhode Island and worked for  a lottery systems vendor called GTECH . The technology is interesting and the people are _great_ but after the founders left there were too many DilbertStories, so I moved back home to Boston.
---++ Misc

If you have comments or suggestions, please email me at toby@caboteria.org.

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