Blogging from the Server Side

I'm P.J. Hinton, the Director of Engineering (and wannabee wordsmith) at Compendium Blogware. I'm part of a talented and passionate team of software and system engineers who are working to develop a better business blogging platform.

I'm an old timer relative to the company's history, having started in early 2008 as Compendium's second full-time developer. Over that time I've worked primarily server side functionality, stuff you rarely see but surely miss when it isn't working properly.

Past projects have included a distributed system for editing and rendering XML blog page templates, an asynchronous system for notifying blog update services, a content idea recommendation engine that relies on RSS feed aggregation and caching, and countless RESTful web service endpoints that provide a reliable flow of data to our rich web interfaces.

As a startup employee, I get to wear multiple hats. Although most of my work is in PHP 5 and SQL, every once in a while I get a chance to write JavaScript for the user interface. Some of the things I have worked on include the keyword strength meter and the autosave manager in the editor. I was an active participant in the implementation of the new administrative content moderation interface we rolled out this spring. I've also become (for better or worse), the Engineering team's resident nomenclature guy, responsible for reviewing the names of object classes and web service endpoints.

Jumping into this role was nothing short of a major skill set retuning. Prior to coming on board with Compendium, I worked largely on cross-platform, native code applications in C and C++, spending two-years working at Rhysome, a northside Indy startup that was trying to break into the nascent Complex Event Processing software market. Before that, I spent a almost a decade at Wolfram Research, working on various parts of the wildly successful technical computing package Mathematica.

Compendium's leadership has succeeded in fostering a creative, energetic, and dynamic working atmosphere, something you'd be more likely to find in the Silicon Valley rather than the Circle City. What's not to love about that? :-)

I'm using this space to blog about subjects like:

the useful features of our blog hosting software
the value of corporate blogging in general
administrative issues in maintaining business blogs
the use of software to understand social networks
technologies relevant to our software development efforts

Comments for About this Blog and its Author

Saturday, June 28, 2008 by Douglas Karr:: Great post, PJ! You're truly dedicated and excited by your work, that's very cool to see. I enjoy our time, though sporadic, over at The Bean Cup!
Monday, June 29, 2009 by Jacque Riehl:: PJ! How funny to find you here. I have only recently found your company through Brian's webinars to the event planning industry. He advertised on one of our forums through LinkedIn and so I got on Compendium's website and found you. Needless to say, I was shocked...what a small world!!! You'll have to catch me up on you and let me know the "inside story" on what your company does and how it can help my business. I'll be talking to Clayton in the fall about it (as a policy, we don't take on new vendors during our busy season, the summer). Hope you are doing well and sounds like you are working for a great company!