Highly skilled and experienced
“Julian is incredibly creative, energetic, and brilliant. No matter what the task he will find a way to make it happen. An absolute delight to work with, he has an eye both for the big picture and the detail to get there. Anyone who gets to spend time with Julian, whether as client, colleague or friend, is lucky indeed.” - Grant Gouldon, manager at Silicon Graphics
An overview
Photo is of me at age 4.
For most of the jobs I've had, I used more than one skillset at a time. For example, at ILM I was simultaneously a programmer and a system admin. As a result of this, my years of experience, taken together, add up to more than my age. Here is a breakdown of approximately how long I’ve worked on each skill.
- 10+ years as a Project Manager
- 20+ years of Programming
- 8+ years of System Administration
- 8+ years of Database experience
- 10+ years of involvement in Open Source communities
- 10+ years of Technical Writing
- 10+ years of QA + Testing
- 5+ years of Customer Support
- Business and Startup experience aplenty
- Instructor and Public Speaker
About Julian
I love working on projects. Figuring out the best ways to crack a given nut, and doing my part to bring about great results, makes me happy. I am that rare combination of a “people person” who also happens to obsess on low-level technical implementation.
I enjoy the process of planning and leading a team to build an engineering project, including creating easily understood Gantt charts. I like writing documentation and specifications. I find writing code and testing fully addictive. It makes me happy to help my coworkers and clients.
At entrepreneur meetings, I am regularly asked to advise others on business approaches, on the ideal technology to use, PR, funding, and a wide variety of challenges that startups face. I have notable experience with almost every skill that's needed to create a startup.
Highlights of Fun and Interest
- System Administrator for 100+ SGI and Sun machines for Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) during the time that we created the revolutionary effects for the movies Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, among others.
- Recruited and working with an A+ team for The Human Creativity Project
- Become great friends with most of the key people who created Perl, MySQL, and Apache
Created Key-O-Matic, a customer facing web Perl cgi program in 1994, when the web was in its infancy. The program saved the company from hiring several additional employees and notably increased customer satisfaction. It is still being used in production today.- Some of the internal ads we made for Key-O-Matic were hilarious.
- Heidi Wall, the daughter of Larry Wall (creator of Perl), named her son after me. He is Julian Wall.
- A photo I took on the cover of Rolling Stone Italy
- As a photographer I’ve done sessions with such people as Tim O'Reilly, Richard Stallman, Kevin Rose, the CTO of Microsoft, the CTO of Red Hat, Terry Gross, Larry Harvey, and Debbie Harry, among others.
I wrote this tiny swirling java program just for fun in 1996. - For 8 years, I managed a camp of 20+ people at Burning Man. I ran a professional photo studio operating constantly in the deep desert. I worked long days on my feet in 105 degree heat. This was experience doing notable project management in a chaotic environment with fully voluntary workers, and resulted in "The People of Burning Man" photo book.
- I worked at SGI during both it's heyday and it's eventual near demise.
- Many years taking studio photographs at Open Source tech conventions
- 4 illustrations of mine were used as full page ads in International Design magazine.
- I was in the Woodstock movie at age 3 1/2, in the New York Times Magazine - Fashions at age 8, and noted in the San Francisco Chronicle at age 12 for being an entrepreneur.
- I was the poster child for unconference in an article in Business Week.
- I made a flash animation for my friend Kelsey's birthday.
- Taught an adult education class on BASIC programming when I was in 11th grade. Used the money I earned to buy a floppy drive.
- Buying a house in San Francisco 1996 and creating the household Meerkat Manor.
- All of the images on this website were made or produced by me.
Contact Julian
Get in touch and chat about your company or project.
Julian Cash 415.738.9385 julian@HireThisGeek.com or see the contact page.