Ladd Van Tol

Contact Info

email:
phone:
503-778-0221
location:
Portland, OR 97211
Please do not contact for opportunities outside the Portland area.

Work Experience

eBay, Inc
Portland, OR
Senior Member of Technical Staff
December 2010 - Present
  • Lead engineer on eBay for iPhone, continuing work started at Critical Path Software (acquired by eBay in December)
Critical Path Software
Portland, OR
Senior Software Engineer
August 2004 - December 2010
Consultant, providing engineering services for a variety of well-known companies. Projects include:
  • iPhone/iPad application, prominently featured by Apple. Install base in the millions.
  • Internet video-on-demand for Mac and Windows
  • Blog-related web application, running as a Java servlet on Linux
  • Halftoning implementation for a printer driver
  • Game emulation system for Mac
  • Port of a major browser plugin to Mac Intel systems
  • Instant Messaging client on Mac
  • Online poker client for Mac
  • Qt-based GUI application for Linux
Spiny Software
Portland, OR
Founder
March 1996 - Present
TechTracker, Inc
Portland, OR
Senior Software Engineer
September 1998 - July 2004
Handled a variety of major projects, including:
  • Lead Engineer for VersionTracker Pro product line on Macintosh and Windows.
  • Designed two iterations of database schema powering VersionTracker site.
  • Substantially expanded VersionTracker site, designing technical aspects of many key features, including user ratings and reviews.
  • Developed web spidering technology essential to the business.
Undergraduate Researcher
June 1998 - August 1999
  • At the University of Wisconsin, researched ray tracing software for the Visible Human Dataset
  • At CalTech, researched land mine locating robots, using novel plume-tracking techniques

Education

Graduated with highest honors in May of 2003 with a double major in Computer Science and Philosophy.
University of Wisconsin
La Crosse, WI
September 1997 - December 1999, September 2002 - May 2003
Christian Brothers University
Memphis, TN
August 1996 - May 1997

Relevant Skills

Concepts
Skilled in:
  • 3D graphics programming
  • Client/Server design and implementation
  • Database schema design
  • Human Interface design and construction
  • Network programming
  • Object Oriented design techniques, including:
    • Information hiding
    • Object interface design
    • Pragmatic class hierarchy design
    • Refactoring
  • Performance optimization
  • Reverse engineering
Platforms
Skilled with:
  • Mac OS X
  • iPhone
  • Linux
  • FreeBSD
Some experience with:
  • Windows (all variants)
  • Various commerical Unix variants
Languages / Tools
Skilled with:
  • Objective-C/Objective-C++
    • Apple Cocoa Framework
    • Apple Cocoa Touch Framework
  • C/C++
    • POSIX libraries
    • Standard Template Libraries
    • Apple Carbon APIs
  • Java
    • JDBC
    • JDOM
    • Servlets
Extensive experience with:
  • CVS, Subversion, and Perforce
  • JavaScript
  • make
  • OpenGL, including GLSL
  • PHP, Perl, Python, TCL, AppleScript and shell scripting
  • PowerPC (including AltiVec), x86, 680x0, and 68HC11 assembly
  • Qt
  • SQL
  • XML-RPC, SOAP
Some experience with:
  • D Parser, ANTLR, flex & bison
  • Lisp, Prolog, Eiffel and Icon
  • XWindows
Markup / Layout
Skilled with:
  • XML using DOM and SAX
    • XML Schema
    • XSL, Xpath, Xquery
  • HTML, XHTML, CSS
  • Internal details of PDF file format
Other Software
Skilled with:
  • Apache web server
  • Apache Tomcat
  • Apache Cocoon
  • Eclipse
  • FastCGI
  • MySQL
  • Xcode