Hi, I'm Kevin Lawver. This is My Resumé.

Contact Info

Introduction

My name is Kevin and I'm passionate about the web. I've been building web applications since 1997 and am still in love with building and launching products. I spent 13 years at AOL building gigantic (for the time) web applications for search, feed reading, and several social media apps. After that, I spent 4 years at a startup trying to bring science to the music industry. And now I'm the chief of engineering at a web operations company where I help startups scale from 10 to 10 million users. I love solving hard problems, taking requirements and building standards-compliant, scalable, usable and awesome web apps. I'm passionate about what I do and have spoken at conferences all over the world about web standards, development and operations, helped write a book about standards-based development, done training and led agile development teams of all sizes. Like I said, I'm passionate about the web.

What am I looking for? I'm a big fan of ROWE, remote work, and agile processes like Scrum and Kanban (and choosing the right one for the job). I'd love to help build a development team and build awesome stuff together.

Skills

Roles

I've spent my entire career at three companies: AOL (1995-2008), Music Intelligence Solutions (2008 - 2012) and Rails Machine (2012-present). I "grew up" at AOL, starting in technical support over a summer break from school. I was learning so much and having too much fun to go back to school, so I stayed. I ended up working in the PrimeHost queue (AOL's small business web hosting company), where I was given my own web server with full scripting access (Tcl) and a relational database to play with (Illustra). I fell in love with web development in 1996 and have never looked back. I caught the attention of a team at the home office in Dulles, VA, in 1998 and moved there in early 1999, where I was the first "web guy" on the team. I worked my way up the technical ladder, going from "Associate Interactive Media Developer" to "Systems Architect" in seven years. I've listed some highlights from the projects I worked on below (there are so many, I don't even remember all of them), but I thought I'd list some of the roles I've held over the years here:

Community

It's important to me to be involved in my community and do what I can to help out. When I was at AOL, the developers in the company were my community. Now that I live in Savannah, my community includes local developers, designers and entrepreneurs. Here are some of the things I've done with regards to community involvement.

Projects

The projects listed below are just some of the highlights from my time at AOL, Music Intelligence Solutions and Rails Machine. I've built a couple dozen separate search applications, two intranets not worth talking about, lots of prototypes, three major multi-month projects for products that never launched, Dashboard, Opera, Netvibes and a handful of other types of widgets, and more static pages for more purposes than I can remember.