Robert Fischer

Current

Grails Expert at Shapely Shadow
Speaker at No Fluff, Just Stuff
Independent Consultant, Problem Solver at Smokejumper Consulting

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Past

Grails Expert / Technical Lead for Outsourced Team at 9ci (Greenbill Product)
Rails Developer at Pointomatic
Grails Testing Consultant at Minggl

Founder at TwitAssist.com
Groovy/Struts/Java and Ruby on Rails Contractor at Vita Rara
Open Source Ocaml Contractor at Merjis
Ruby on Rails Website Developer at Perfectly Earthly
Web Service/Application System Developer at Integration Architects
FIT/Agile Adoption Specialist and Java Developer at ECMC
Agile/Pragmatic Consulting Subcontrator at SGF Consulting
Groovy/Grails/Flex Developer at Carol
Founder at A Place Coworking Center
Java Development and Agile Adoption Consultant at Room and Board
Perl Scripter at AllRegs
Agile Implementation/Development Consultant at Wells Fargo
Technical Lead at United Behavioral Health
Developer for Health Monitoring Group at Thomson Legal and Regulatory
Web Developer at Healthia Consulting
Junior Developer at Hamline/3M
MSAccess Developer at AOPC

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17 more...

Recommended

17 people have recommended Robert

Connections

174 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

Robert Fischer’s Summary

Robert Fischer is a multi-language open source developer currently specializing in Groovy in Grails. In the past, his specialties have been in Perl, Java, Ruby, and OCaml. In the future, his specialty will probably be F# or (preferably) a functional JVM language like Scala or Clojure.

Robert is the author of "Grails Persistence in GORM and GSQL" with APress, is currently writing "Polyglot Programming in a Java Environment" for Manning, is a regular contributor to WebDev Publishing's "GroovyMag" and "JSMag" magazines, is the founder of the JConch Java concurrency library, and the author/maintainer of Liquibase-DSL and the Autobase database migration plugin for Grails, along with Background Thread, GORM Labs, Sublog, and TestingLabs.

Robert Fischer’s Specialties:

Technical Team Mentoring and Leadership, Software Architecture and Development (Web and batch applications in Java, Ruby, JRuby, Rails, Groovy, Grails), Continuous Integration Environments (Hudson and Bamboo), OCaml/F#

Robert Fischer’s Experience

Grails Expert

Shapely Shadow

(Apparel & Fashion industry)

June 2009 — Present (2 months)

Came on board as part of a push towards final release for a new Grails project (FastFit360: https://www.fastfit360.com/main/). The project emphasizes scalability and a rich application feel.
Speaker

No Fluff, Just Stuff

(Information Technology and Services industry)

April 2009 — Present (4 months)

Speaker on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour, particularly on topics relating to Grails and concurrency. More information at http://snipr.com/robertfischer-nofluff-bio
Independent Consultant, Problem Solver

Smokejumper Consulting

(Information Technology and Services industry)

June 2004 — Present (5 years 2 months)

My wife and I co-founded and run a consulting agency. I provide a technical consulting service, as described in my summary. My wife provides graphic and web design consulting, focused on independent contractors and small businesses.
Grails Expert / Technical Lead for Outsourced Team

9ci (Greenbill Product)

(Privately Held; Computer Software industry)

April 2009 — June 2009 (3 months)

Working with an Indian-based team to develop a Grails website. Responsible for reviewing work performed and providing enhancements to the Grails system to make the work go even faster.
Rails Developer

Pointomatic

(Information Technology and Services industry)

March 2009 — March 2009 (1 month)

Worked with a start-up to turn out a Rails extranet, including advanced JavaScript/AJAX functionality.
Grails Testing Consultant

Minggl

(Internet industry)

November 2008 — January 2009 (3 months)

Advancing and integrating Grails unit testing technology to drive test-driven development adoption on a large, tiered set of Grails applications.
Founder

TwitAssist.com

(Internet industry)

September 2008 — November 2008 (3 months)

Created an application built off the social media phenomenon that is "Twitter". The application provides many useful pieces of functionality which is missing from the main Twitter application.
Groovy/Struts/Java and Ruby on Rails Contractor

Vita Rara

(Computer Software industry)

June 2008 — October 2008 (5 months)

Began as a Smokejumping contract to help deliver a key piece of functionality for a ocean freight costing application. The application was Groovy/Java and Struts on top of MySQL.

The project evolved into a Ruby on Rails project which used JRuby to run inside the Struts 2 stack. The application also provided an iPhone web interface for sales people to interact with the customer relationship management (CRM) aspects of the system.
Open Source Ocaml Contractor

Merjis

(Marketing and Advertising industry)

April 2008 — September 2008 (6 months)

Working for Jeremy Chatfield at Merjis to enhance the CocanWiki system, an open source Ocaml-based wiki. The goal is to evolve the Wiki into a full-fledged CMS.
Ruby on Rails Website Developer

Perfectly Earthly

(Retail industry)

October 2006 — July 2008 (1 year 10 months)

Building a small e-commerce website for Perfectly Earthly, an online retailer. Leveraging the conventional model of Rails so that the site may be easily expanded and maintained by designers familiar with only HTML/CSS. This project was begun after much frustration with Zen Cart. The intent will be for the shopping cart framework to be productized as the standard shopping cart implementation for Graphic Karma Web Design.
Web Service/Application System Developer

Integration Architects

(Information Technology and Services industry)

December 2007 — June 2008 (7 months)

Building a system which consumes government web services and interfaces with local applications in order to provide additional data. The system is built on Groovy-on-Grails, and includes a Hudson deployment for user acceptance testing.
FIT/Agile Adoption Specialist and Java Developer

ECMC

(Non-Profit; 201-500 employees; Financial Services industry)

November 2007 — April 2008 (6 months)

Brought in for phase 2 of a major project which had a very tumultuous initial phase. Specifically, worked with SGF Consulting (www.sgfco.com) to implement a new Agile adoption, including evangelizing test-driven development and improving developer <-> business communication through living specifications.

Key technologies are FIT/FITLibrary, EJB 3.0, and JBoss Seam.
Agile/Pragmatic Consulting Subcontrator

SGF Consulting

(Partnership; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

November 2006 — April 2008 (1 year 6 months)

I am a subcontractor associated with SuperGoFaster (SGF) Consulting. I have signed on with them because I have deep respect for the partners of that company, and I see a lot of wisdom in their pragmatic/agile approach to software development.

My relationship with them has been off-and-on, but since LinkedIn can't support that, I'm setting the time period from the first date of my first contract with them to the last date of my most recent contract.
Groovy/Grails/Flex Developer

Carol

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

August 2007 — November 2007 (4 months)

Brought on board to help build a website for a start-up health care company, structured as a Groovy-on-Grails service with a Flex/Flash front-end. Key technologies are Java, Lucene, Groovy, Grails, Flex/Flash (Action Script 3.0).
Founder

A Place Coworking Center

(Information Technology and Services industry)

May 2007 — August 2007 (4 months)

Founded "A Place", a business community for freelance and telecommuting professionals.
Java Development and Agile Adoption Consultant

Room and Board

(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Retail industry)

February 2007 — August 2007 (7 months)

I was brought on board in order to guide the adoption of continuous integration and evangelize test-driven development, as well as provide an extra hand to take care of some of the backlogged work for their Java web application. Primary focus of work was in managing the data feed out of SAP into their website, including modeling that database, generating database views, performance tuning the database, and generating ORM mapping for the Java code via Hibernate. Other key Java technologies included Bamboo, Jira, Ant, Spring, Hibernate, Struts, Velocity, and Jakarta-Commons.
Perl Scripter

AllRegs

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Financial Services industry)

March 2007 — April 2007 (2 months)

Generated a maintainable, well-documented CGI script that automatically logged users into a customer website. The script was in server-agnostic Perl, capable of running under the Apache HTTP Server, the Tomcat CGI-BIN servlet, and under either FastCGI or mod_perl. Additionally generated usage documentation.
Agile Implementation/Development Consultant

Wells Fargo

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; Banking industry)

November 2006 — February 2007 (4 months)

Initially worked on a series of “clean up” projects. These projects were primarily web applications that needed some emergency help to reach year-end goals. Additionally gathered requirements for, designed, and worked with the business infrastructure team to implement an Agile development environment and project archetype that included continuous integration, database management, and business-facing reports. Participated in requirements mining and priority setting for a new build, tracking, reporting, and deployment system. Key technologies included Cruise Control, Ant, and Struts.
Technical Lead

United Behavioral Health

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; UNH; Insurance industry)

November 2005 — November 2006 (1 year 1 month)

I began as a switch-hitting Java and Perl developer on a project that was running very late, but graduated up to technical lead when the project staff transitioned. In doing so, I brought in the Scrum development methodology (a flavor of Agile), which I credit with the amazing turn-around that resulted. As part of being a technical lead, I implemented automated reporting processes built off of the build cycle in order to track key technical and business metrics. Key technologies: Java, Perl, JUnit, CruiseControl, XML/XSLT.
Developer for Health Monitoring Group

Thomson Legal and Regulatory

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; TOC; Legal Services industry)

December 2004 — November 2005 (1 year)

Implemented customer-driven application improvements and took the initiative to introduce test driven development to the team responsible for monitoring the health of the WestLaw technical infrastructure. Specifically, ported a collection of VB/ASP web applications to C#/ASP.Net. Received awards for outstanding performance in implementing these ports. Key technologies: C#/ASP.Net, NUnit, MockObjects.
Web Developer

Healthia Consulting

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

August 2002 — December 2004 (2 years 5 months)

Worked on the StoneBridge Exchange (now Healthia Exchange) insurance eligibility verification gateway.
Junior Developer

Hamline/3M

(Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

February 2001 — September 2003 (2 years 8 months)

Provided technical assistance for a 3M/Hamline University liaison exploring the ways to improve undergraduate science and math education. Developed an interactive textbook written in the Perl language and running on the Apache web server on UNIX.
MSAccess Developer

AOPC

(Partnership; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

May 2000 — August 2000 (4 months)

Lived and worked in Cologne, Germany. Developed an in-house account and task tracking system for a consulting agency.