More about Tom — Zeetix, LLC: Web strategy, web branding, web design, social networking, and internet marketing services

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Thomas M. Stambaugh

Founder, CEO, CTO

Tom Stambaugh is an energetic, articulate and seasoned hands-on technologist and visionary who continues to pursue the personal computing revolution launched by Smalltalk in 1982. Today's challenges of browser-based application delivery, scalable language- and platform-neutral services, user interface design, information architecture, and effective use of emerging technology demand the expertise, wisdom and insight uniquely offered by Tom's deep and broad experience. Tom brings to today's opportunities the perspective gained from his many important contributions in user interface design, object oriented technology, hypermedia, groupware, and software development tools. Tom's technical skills are complemented by his interpersonal and communications skills, allowing him to provide mentoring, team-building, and management consulting as needed.

Current

Tom is the founder of Zeetix, LLC (http://www.zeetix.com), a privately-funded start-up dedicated to realizing Tom's lifelong vision of making great technology available to everyone everywhere. Zeetix™ (multiple patents pending) technology combines Google's mapping technology in the browser with the most powerful web-based server technologies to create a universal computing environment ("Hex") populated by clouds that each sustain real and virtual user, business, and developer communities, information, and services. ZeeGuide™ (http://www.zeeguide.com and http://www.zeeguide.org) uses Zeetix technology to create neighborhood networks —a "facebook for neighborhoods". ZeeLife™ (http://www.zeelife.com and http://www.zeelife.org) is pioneering a new "Personal Science" industry —a world where scientists and consumers create, edit, save, and publish science. ZeeForge™ (http://www.zeeforge.com and http://www.zeeforge.org) is the software development arm of Zeetix.

Tom is actively seeking consulting/contracting engagements during the launch of Zeetix. Tom is eager to help clients apply Zeetix technology and share its benefits. Zeetix is object-oriented "all the way down", and draws heavily on Tom's deep Smalltalk expertise. Browser-side capabilities are in Javascript, html (strict), and CSS. Browser/server interactions rely heavily on AJAX and use JSON as the serialization protocol. Zeetix uses Apache web servers, and Tom has developed a suite of tools for managing directories, configuration files, staging servers, and so on. While Tom wrote virtually all of the current Zeetix server software in Python, he has previously or concurrently written many of the "assemblies" in Perl, Java, and Smalltalk. Zeetix uses MySQL and avoids use of unusual or non-standard SQL or database capabilities.

Prior Experience

Tom operated a successful consulting practice, providing software solutions, products and services, for over fourteen years. Engagements included executive consulting for a rural health information network and technology development for several Boston-area bio-pharmaceutical companies, focusing on providing desktop and web-based enterprise-scale tools for sequence analysis, validation of high-volume gene expression data, managing high-volume sequence data, gene information management, and collaborative information systems. Tom ported and deployed one of the first wikis in 1997, based on Ward Cunningham’s original Perl implementation. At Millennium, Tom made significant extensions to Wiki, including templated pages, that have subsequently been incorporated into the wiki mainstream. Tom is an early signer of the “Agile Manifesto” and has practiced “extreme programming” and test-driven development since its inception.

Clients included Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Aventis Pharmaceuticals (now Sanofi-Aventis), Software2000 (now Infinium Software, Inc.) and a host of others. Tom brought to his consulting practice the discipline and professionalism gained from his several years of simultaneous experience as a Managing Architect within the Object Technology Practice of IBM.

Prior to that, Tom founded a venture-funded software company, backed by John Doerr and Mitch Kapor, that partnered with Sun and made major contributions to the Sun research efforts that became Java.

Tom was a founding member of Mitch Kapor's ON Technology, where he led ON's user-interface group and laid important foundations for much of what we know today as “The Web”. Tom came to ON from the staff of IRIS (the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship) at Brown University, where Tom helped build “Intermedia”, a primordial hypermedia environment used by humanities scholars at Brown a decade before the invention of the web.

Tom's interest in hypermedia and user-interface began in the early eighties with his leadership of the then-emerging object-oriented technology. Tom invented the “Layer Manager” paradigm as part of “CadMac” (acquired by Apple in 1986), a source-compatible implementation of the Macintosh toolbox that seamlessly extended the original Macintosh look and feel to support multiple simultaneous applications in a Unix environment.

During the dawn of the object-oriented software era (prior to C++ and ObjectiveC), Tom created C-language compiler tools that brought Smalltalk functionality to C-language applications. These tools leveraged Tom’s deep understanding of the Smalltalk-80 environment, developed during Digital Equipment Corporation’s early port of Smalltalk-80. Tom performed his professional apprenticeship as a hardware engineer in the PDP11 Systems Group of Digital Equipment Corporation, in Maynard, MA, where he began his career after receiving his B.S.E.E. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Keywords

Programming Languages: Python, Javascript, Perl, Smalltalk, Java, Ruby, C/C++, others
Databases: SQL, MySql, ODBC, others
Tools: Komodo, Wingware, Emacs, Wiki (various implementations), others
Platforms: WinXP, Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora), others
Concepts: User Interface, Object-Oriented, Distributed Architectures, Content Management, others