John Dimm—Full Stack Developer & Data Engineer in San Diego

On the front-end, I'm a specialist in feel, not look. I find interesting ways of navigating through data, and worry about creating consistent logical and fast connections, but I let a professional designer make the interface pretty. Don't be fooled by this website design. It was shamelessly copied from Jun Lu, a very talented designer in New York, and I encourage you to use him for all your website design needs, although from the looks of things he's doing fine without us, thank you.

On the back-end, I enjoy processing large quantities of data to extract useful information. Big data is data that doesn't fit in memory, so it's hard to process, but the volume itself often makes standard statistical algorithms, designed for small data, produce amazing results.

As manager, my ideal job is acting as a coach to a small team of smart and highly motivated developers working on projects that matter.

As developer, I value simplicity over brevity, but strive for code that has both. I avoid early optimization, boilerplate, big source files, long compile times, and monolithic applications.

After many years of working in C++, i switched to interpreted languages in the early days of the Web. The work of generating a web page is small compared to substantial back-end processes like search and database access. I’m glad to see Javascript become widely used for serious applications.

I always start a project by developing a “thin line” through the system, one that exercises each of the major components, cutting corners at every opportunity. The goal is to enable one essential path from the user's first contact to a useful result. In the end, much of the code from this first system may be thrown away, but the learnings are invaluable for the whole team.