Chris Cummer

Currently working to make the travel adventure world a better place. http://travergence.org

I was hired by Coverall Crew to lead the development on two large Ruby on Rails applications developed for their client, Adobe Inc:

• Adobe Agency Partner Portal - Rails 2 & jQuery. APP is Adobe's private portal for their creative partners, providing special access to resources, news, and software. http://agencies.adobe.com
• Adobe Youth Voices Gallery - Rails 3 & jQuery. AYV showcases video content created by Adobe's educational partners and their students, allowing users to share content via custom playlists, Facebook, or Twitter. http://youthvoices.adobe.com/galleries

Dreambank is a funded, highly-regarded online gift registry website. I was hired to take over technical management of the site, finish the development, and bring it to market, which we did in mid-2008. After that I improved the code quality, expanded the functionality, and implemented a Rails-based reporting system. http://dreambank.org

FLM built entertainment software that ran onboard commercial aircraft, most notably:

• PaxChat - Lamp/PHP & Qt. PaxChat is a seat-to-seat instant messaging application for jumbo aircraft, built for Thales Avionics.
• Postcard From the Plane - Ruby on Rails & Qt. PCFtP allowed passengers to create custom postcard onboard the aircraft, incorporating real-time flight data. The Rails-based ground system handled all the e-commerce, distribution and client management.

I was hired by Chum Television to overhaul their web development department, hire new staff, refactor their legacy VB code into more manageable systems, and implement standard best-practices and technologies, the first of which was implementing source control and a bug tracker.

In total we were responsible for over 40 websites and 740 000 unique users.

I was hired by OpenCola for research and development to explore ways of building on then-nascent peer-to-peer networks. My team was charging with exploring network efficiencies, protocol anonymization, and "just trusted enough" PKI, all of which culminated in ColaVision.

• ColaVision - Visual Basic. ColaVision was a distributed, p2p media discovery and delivery system that ran atop the Napster, Scour and Gnutella networks. It debuted at DefCon in Las Vegas in 2000 and was promptly shut down by the lawyers and locked away forever in 2001. That was probably a good idea. Risk of being a video Napster doesn't fluster Toronto firm

Climb It is an iPhone app that allows rock climbers to plan climbing trips and track their ascents. It also contains over 7 000 rock climbing routes across North America. Rails is used for the website and the backend data aggregation tools. http://climbitapp.com

In July, 2011 Climb It was favourably mentioned in Gripped, Canada's premier rock climbing magazine.

Gearkata is a website for creating a sharing packing lists for outdoor adventures. It was designed and built entirely in the hope that I would never again forget my headlamp or helmet. http://gearkata.com

Gearkata is a work-in-progress that lives in un-stealth mode; it has been live through it's entire development cycle, bugs and all.

Crag Dog is a rock climbing grade converter that converts between 13 climbing and bouldering systems. The icon alone is worth the price. http://cragdogapp.com

Crag Dog is surprisingly popular in Scandinavia, for reasons unknown.