Hi, I'm

Paul Fisher.

I row. I curl. I make software.

I studied software engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology in beautiful Western New York. Now I work at Google Cambridge and row with Riverside Boat Club.

Find me elsewhere

My primary Other Website is Google+. Encircle me there and you will never be short on inane links.

I also have several other website-type-things. Check out my Identipelago to find out where you can find what I've been up to, real-time, in painful detail.

Photography

Visit my Flickr profile to view photos that I take of things, like rowing, landscapes, and other things. Eventually I'll put a view of some photos here.

Rowing

Before I graduated and started at Riverside, I rowed at RIT. On my athlete information page RIT says I'm 6′ tall. I contend that I am only 5′ 11.5″. I row port, or left. Or right, because I face backwards in the boat. This is why we only ever call it port.

You might also want to read the team news, or look at the team roster.

SSE

I used to be the co-Directory of Technology for the RIT Society of Software Engineers, along with Chris Hossenlopp and (at a different time) Daniel Joseph. That entailed managing the SSE web server and its many services, including our infamous website, mailing lists, and our Mercurial and Subversion repositories.

Projects

I occasionally do cool projects outside of work just for fun. Back in the day, I also did some neat work for software engineering classes and SSE.

I developed a simple Mercurial management system to make it easy for students to set up a remote Mercurial repository and allow selected RIT students to push changes. This is an open-source system, which you are free to use and distribute under the GPL.
I worked for the RIT Open Printing Lab and developed a plug-in for the Moin Moin wiki system to transform collections of wiki pages into a book. It transformed page text into LaTeX markup, and turned that into a PDF. It hasn't been publicly released yet, unfortunately.
I've worked on several "Rapid Development Weekends" with the Society of Software Engineers, where we develop an entire application (or enough of one that we feel good) in a single crazy coffee- and Mountain Dew–fueled weekend. These projects are why I ended up deploying the SSE Subversion repository system.

Writing

Every once in a while you can catch me doing some long-form writing, rather than just silly posts or dumb links.

Don't forget to _____! Collected advice on what "other things" you need to do to ensure your project's success.
DMA explained: If you've ever read about "DMA" and wondered, "What exactly is that?" I have an explanation.
SQL injection explained: So what is SQL injection? Again, I have an explanation.

Friends who do neat things

I occasionally have a life outside of rowing and Google.

Kevin Kuchta: …is always up to something. Now he helps you make expense reports not suck with Expensify.
Chris Cowdery-Corvan: …is so ambitious it kind of scares me. And people love Chris Cowdery-Corvan! How much better does it get?
George Adams: George (W.) Adams (IV) is very tall and can slam out code like nobody's business. He works for a company whose name I dare not speak.
Tom Rudick: …lived in my apartment. He knows a lot about Internets and "Web 2.0" and all that nonsense. Now he works on Bing.
Nick Quaranto: …and I disagree on many things, including the best DVCS (Git vs. Mercurial), and preferred high-level programming language (Ruby vs. Python), but he's very smart, and he's got a lot to say. He works across the river at ThoughtBot.
Alberto Pareja-Lecaros: Facebook says that Alberto enjoys "being Hispanic". He's quite good at it, too.

Cooler people named Paul Fisher

Follow the Fish: This Paul Fisher has figured out how to get paid to travel around the world and take videos of his escapades. I'm a little jealous.
Paul C. Fisher: This one invented the Fisher Space Pen, so you didn't have to be right-side up when you were writing. Or, you know, you could be in space. Technically, though, he only was cooler than me, because now he's dead.
I've been killed!: Which is a shame, really.

Contact

I can often be reached over instant messenger, on Jabber/Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, and on Yahoo! at thetorpedodog, or MSN at thetorpedodog@hotmail.com.

Email me, or call +1 513 708 9079

202 Franklin Street #2 Cambridge, MA 02139

GPG key ID: 7B41F60A.