LinkedInLaurence "GreenReaper" Parry

Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry

Software Developer, Editor and Community Archivist

Location
Irving, Texas
Industry
Computer Software
Current
  1. Metafur,
  2. Inkbunny,
  3. Flayrah
Previous
  1. GameStop,
  2. Stardock,
  3. Wikimedia Foundation
Education
  1. University of Bath
Recommendations2 people have recommended Laurence
Websites
208connections

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208connections
Metafur

Metafur

Software Developer

– Present

View full profile

Background

Summary

I'm a low-level software developer and all-round geek who likes to pick systems apart and improve them. Need to track down that leak, cut load time by 40%, or call that undocumented function? I'm your guy.

I also have experience building client and web-based applications which end-users want to use.

Outside work, I develop and lead non-profit fan websites, and act as a community journalist and archivist. This involves organizing, training, and motivating small volunteer teams; configuring, modifying and caching web applications; managing databases; writing/editing articles; and curating social platforms.

Experience

Software Developer

Metafur
– Present (1 year 4 months)Irving, Texas

I'm taking a career break to refresh my professional skills. During this time I have been assuming leadership of a large community website, and completing other deferred personal development projects.

Lead Administrator and Database Analyst

Inkbunny
– Present (4 years 10 months)

Inkbunny is an art community which has attracted over 230,000 users and 500,000 works since launch. As its lead administrator (and currently lead developer), I interact with users daily while working with staff to shape site policy, design, create and test features, and identify security vulnerabilities.

Site founder: "He has always been willing to let me know when he thought I was doing something that wasn't wise. More times than I can count now, his maturity and level-headedness have stopped me acting on impulse or out of anger in tense situations. He has been a voice of calm, reason and logic. This is a crucial state of mind to have when weathering the kinds of storms you endure as a site owner."

Technical work to date has focused on refactoring a PostgreSQL database which evolved over five years, identifying ~50% in reductions through data type changes, alignment tweaks and unused index removal. My query optimizations have also resulted in 10-100x improvements in search and paging performance.

Editor-in-Chief

Flayrah
– Present (5 years)

Flayrah is a furry community news portal dating back to 2001. I rewrote it using Drupal, refreshed it with original content and relevant feeds, and built a team of contributors. Custom code includes rating-based comment folding using jQuery, data-driven podcast and contributor lists, and Twitter Cards integration.

Site founder's endorsement: "In record time, he pulled the site apart by its guts, somehow importing all the ancient content, along with a hundred or so more recent WikiFur News posts, into a new, modern Drupal content management system. The site is slick-looking, retains all the old user accounts, and has a lot of potential for future use. I'm impressed."

I am responsible for formatting, copyediting, and illustrating work, supervising and mentoring contributors, and developing and maintaining distribution channels, as well as ongoing coding.

Flayrah is syndicated on Google News; it was voted Best Magazine at the 2011 Ursa Majors.

Founder and Executive Director

WikiFur
– Present (9 years 6 months)

WikiFur is a volunteer-run, wiki-based encyclopedia of furry (anthropomorphic animal) fandom, covering over 17,500 topics with localization projects in twenty languages.

Leading the project, I am responsible for user management, donations, development, public relations and server administration (FreeBSD/PHP/MediaWiki/MySQL/Varnish/Javascript). I make executive decisions with the advice of colleagues and supervise the site's consensus-based policies.

Software Developer

GameStop
(2 years 2 months)Grapevine, Texas

While further developing, building and deploying GameStop's digital downloads app (C#/C++/JavaScript, with Chromium Embedded Framework). I used telemetry to identify and fix issues, delivered a stub installer that was 1/15th the size of Steam's, and established Windows 8/.NET 4 compatibility.

Assisting the team's web developers, I fixed bugs in our content server, resolved jQuery, Javascript, and HTTP compression issues, and enhanced and refactored automation test scripts (Ruby).

I also assumed TFS/SSRS administration duties for several teams after a resignation, migrated an internal Sharepoint wiki to MediaWiki, and implemented a Gerrit code review prototype.

Software Developer and Researcher

Stardock
(6 years 2 months)Plymouth, Michigan Area

Worked on all aspects of software development, in C++, C# and VB.NET through VB and VBScript and x86 assembly code. I often assisted remote developers and debugged problems with end-users.

Projects ranged from optimizing computer games, developing desktop applications, improving the performance of IRC servers, wiki administration, writing trampoline code to intercept system calls, creating virtual pets, and disassembling Windows Presentation Foundation for research purposes.

I was lead developer of LogonStudio, a logon screen customization tool for Windows Vista/7, and TweakVista, a utility which helped users alter hard-to-find system settings.

Editor, Journalist and Software Developer

Wikimedia Foundation
(6 years)

I created several "good articles" on Wikipedia, co-founded WikiProject Furry, and won community awards for original reporting and photojournalism at Wikinews.

I have contributed patches to MediaWiki, and wrote an authentication plugin which imports accounts from another MediaWiki instance - useful in migrations from third-party hosting providers.

I presented "A Tale of Two Wikis" at Wikimania 2006 and talked on related topics at NYC Wiki-Conference 2009, both Wikimedia-sponsored events.

I still edit Wikimedia projects, but due to time constraints I contribute less than 50 edits per month.

Co-Founder and Promoter

Creatures Wiki
(1 year 9 months)

Creatures is an artificial life game for which I developed several modding tools and a leading chat client. Seeing that information about the game and its addons was being lost, I joined a project to preserve it.

Under my leadership, the Creatures Wiki was the first to achieve "featured wiki" status on Wikia. I made 8000+ edits, managed 100+ editors, and provided regular reports to the community.

I established content and taxonomy standards, researched lost websites, and used CSS and Javascript to enhance the site's theme.

Beta Tester, Software Developer and Customer Support Specialist

Stardock
(5 years 7 months)

I provided ongoing beta testing and newsgroup/IRC support for the Object Desktop suite (particularly WindowBlinds), various games, and the Drengin.net/Stardock Central/Impulse distribution platform.

I developed a skin benchmarking tool used to identify performance issues and test improvements.

I reverse-engineered the protocol for strategy game Entrepreneur/The Corporate Machine, and created a superior chat client for it which later became an official server.

Student Software Engineer

Motorola
(3 years)Swindon, United Kingdom

In three two-month summer placements, I overhauled a compiled object dumping tool (C++), designed and implemented a database-driven product testing website (JavaScript, PHP, MySQL), and performed hardware tests of handset handover between cellular base stations.

Education

University of Bath

BSc (hons), Computer Science

I graduated with first-class honours, taking elective modules in compilers, microprocessor design, computer graphics, agents, HCI, networking, and music and DSPs.

For my final-year project I decrypted and reverse-engineered the aleatoric background music format for artificial life game "Creatures 2", writing my own player and editor in C#. My lexer/parser libraries were later used in a multi-platform open source reimplementation of the game engine.

Activities and Societies: Producer for University Radio Bath, co-founder of Computer Science Society, member of Gravity Vomit (juggling).

Whitgift School

Computer Science, Electronics (A* at GCSE), Maths, Physics, Chemistry (Grade A at A-level)

11 GCSEs, 4 A-levels. Received awards for creative writing, published in school magazine.

Activities and Societies: Chess team captain, computer room manager, theatrical actor

Projects

GameStop PC Downloads (Impulse) - Client Software Developer(Link)

The GameStop App and its associated website form the sales and fulfilment channel for GameStop's PC digital downloads. I maintained portions of the App's client-side components (C++, C#, Javascript), as well as its stub downloader, installer, and the build process (InstallAware, Dotfuscator, batch files).

Team members:

Anthropomorphic Research Project - Advisory Board and Reporter(Link)

– Present

The Anthropomorphic Research Project seeks to answer psychological, anthropological and sociological questions about furry fandom through quantitative means, including surveys at conventions such as Anthrocon, Furry Fiesta and Furnal Equinox.

As an Advisory Board member, I contribute an external perspective to discussions of survey results and research questions. I summarize findings for fandom publication, and assist with survey distribution.

Team members:

Yerf Historical Archive - Web Developer and Curator(Link)

– Present

Yerf (formerly the Squeeky Clean Furry Archive) was an art gallery founded in 1996. It underwent several crashes before dying completely in 2007. An existing archive of its content (written in Ruby on Rails) was to close; I wrote a simple PHP front-end to display the collection, and now handle administrative tasks.

Team members:

Volunteer Experience & Causes

Category Editor

Open Directory Project
– Present (5 years 6 months)Arts and Culture

I maintain Society/People/Furry and related directory entries, covering comics, conventions, fursuiting, magazines, MUCKs and other roleplaying games, organizations and a list of regional groups.

Convention Operations Staff

Anthrocon, Inc.
(3 years)Arts and Culture

Operations team staff member: handling requests from other departments, member assistance, emergencies, lost-and-found, and counting and securing registration funds.

Convention Operations Staff

Furry Connection North
(1 year)Arts and Culture

Opportunities Laurence is looking for:

  • Joining a nonprofit board

Causes Laurence cares about:

  • Animal Welfare
  • Arts and Culture
  • Science and Technology

Organizations Laurence supports:

  • Anthrocon, Inc.
  • Anthropomorphic Arts and Education, Inc.

Honors & Awards

Ursa Major Award - Best Anthropomorphic Magazine (as editor)

Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Association

The Ursa Major is furry fandom's equivalent of the Hugo Award, determined annually by popular vote.

Best Magazine is awarded for "edited collections of creative and/or informational works by various people, professional or amateur, published in print or online in written, pictorial or audio-visual form."

Additional Honors & Awards

Finalist, 2000 British Infomatics Olympiad
Barnstars: Wikipedia (original, real-life), Wikinews (original reporting)
Dallas Windows 8 App Hackathon winner

Publications

A Scripted Sample-Based Music System for Game Environments using .NET(Link)

University of Bath
May 2004

Modern consumer hardware permits computer games to provide complex scripted music. We describe reverse-engineering the file format and scripting language of such a system in the artificial life game "Creatures 2", and creating a component-based music editor and player using an LALR parser compiler and Visitor-based interpretation engine written in C#.

A Tale of Two Wikis(Link)

Wikimania 2006
August 2006

The spread of wiki technology and Wikimedia’s restricted goals has led to the creation of separate community-focused wikis. Many do not reach their full potential through a lack of focus or leadership; others fail to attract stable contributors due to inadequate policies or promotion. This situation can be improved.

Variations in topic, audience, and technical ability demand differing approaches when building and managing wiki communities. I provide concrete examples from two: Creatures Wiki, based around an artificial life simulation for children; and WikiFur, an encyclopedia for the furry (anthropomorphic) fandom. I show community solutions to issues arising from policy decisions, and describe approaches to disruption, including legal threats, proxy attacks, and influxes of visitors – and vandals – from popular websites.

I discuss the applicability of Wikipedia’s policies, and effective methods of online and offline promotion, recruiting, advertising, and monitoring. I outline the use of featured content in driving regular contributions and traffic, and note the importance of personal leadership and delegation, concluding that a respected community reference site can be created within six months.

Skills

  • jQuery
  • CSS
  • C#
  • JavaScript
  • MySQL
  • MediaWiki
  • Wikis
  • PHP
  • Drupal
  • Software Development
  • SharePoint
  • Programming
  • CMS
  • VB.NET
  • Reverse Engineering
  • Editing
  • SQL
  • Git
  • HTML
  • Databases
  • Open Source
  • C++
  • Varnish
  • Debugging
  • Disassembly
  • PostgreSQL
  • TCP/IP
  • Windows 8
  • Google Analytics
  • Apache
  • FreeBSD
  • .NET
  • Networking
  • TFS
  • Scrum
  • Multi-User Forth
  • Message Parsing...
  • Photojournalism
  • Community Journalism
  • Online Journalism
  • Windows
  • TinyMUCK
  • VBScript
  • 501c3
  • Furry Fandom
  • IRC
  • Wikipedia
  • Wacom Tablet
  • Community Management
  • Server Administration
  • See 35+  See less

Languages

  1. English

    Native or bilingual proficiency
  2. French

    Elementary proficiency

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