J. Timothy King

Software Development

I got my start writing real-time embedded software for high-speed centrifuges the 1980’s and went on to do embedded software for Kurzweil Music Systems and Avid Technology. Then I brought the discipline and skills honed from embedded systems into enterprise web software. I have an innate urge to develop quality software, achieved through automated code testing, test-first development, and risk managed refactoring. This approach naturally lends itself to working with legacy code, such as successfully and safely refactoring a 465-line legacy function used in a video streaming application into a structurally sound design. Or designing for maintainability, through cleanly layered architectures, like a web service that can handle multiple RPC protocols using a common controller and a thin view layer, that can easily be supplemented to handle additional protocols.

I can be found:

• On LinkedIn – If you’d like to connect professionally.

• At The Perl Shop – We provide Perl development services, Perl coaching, and Perl staffing.

• At my software-development blog, Software Development: A Love-Hate Relationship.

Writing and Stories

I’ve always loved reading and writing. I remember from a young age losing myself in stories and exploring concepts through books and magazines. I first discovered computer programming in an old issue of Radio-Electronics as a pre-teen. And by the time the Internet began breaking out in the early 1990’s, I was spending much of my time as an opinionated, young man arguing politics and theology over USEnet and LISTSERV email lists. If you know how to search, you can still find some of those old postings on the Internet.

Then one fateful day in late 2002, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I wanted to tell stories. And delving into my first attempted novel, I quickly determined that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. So I took a step back and began to write short fiction, to hang out on writing boards, to analyze other people’s work, to try to peer under the skin of the story and ask myself why I reacted to it the way I did.

I ended up learning more about myself than I did about any story or writing technique.

Over the years since then, I’ve grown into a hopefully-not-as-opinionated, middle-aged man exploring politics and theology, art and music, passion and relationships, always in the context of life, and always as interested in hearing others’ stories as I am in telling my own. I’ve written and self-published several books. I’ve given speeches and sermons. And I’ve left behind a trail of words. This is a partial list:

• My personal blog, entitled Hope, Love, and Peace.
• My writing blog, Be the Story.
• My stories blog.