Thomas Ballard
Simi Valley, California 
www.thomas.ballard.ws
Principal Web Producer/Senior UI Engineer
Seeking a position as a principal web producer or senior UI engineer. Desire an opportunity to use my knowledge and experience to build new applications using mature technology and responsible business practices. Have a solid balance of technical, business, analytic, and marketing skills earned over 10 years of active Internet experience, and 10 years of brick and mortar service business.
Professional Summary
I enjoy being challenged, seek to continue learning, and improve the top line. Highly self-motivated, task oriented, hard working, and committed to quality and accountability. Love learning and teaching. Appreciate aptitude in colleagues, and demand accountability of myself and others. Find it easy to identify with customers and treat them respectfully. Approachable and friendly, I tend to become someone others come to for help. Results driven.
Experience
United Online, Inc.
Senior Web Producer / Engineer | Dec. 1999 - Present
United Online (Nasdaq:UNTD) is parent to brands including NetZero, Juno, and Classmates. Division built scalable shared and virtual web hosting solutions catering to vertical niches including Freeservers, MySite, 50Megs, Bizhosting, and GlobalServers. Team added ~3000 reseller brands through Community Architect, increased paying subs to 50,000 and added 5,000,000 free subs to monetize through other means. Served product, engineering, and marketing departments as a technical liaison, directly implementing and coordinating with programming, systems, and QA resources during the development cycle. Postmortem, I provided analysis and assisted with monitoring, AB testing, and maintenance. I focused on lowering development costs, scaled market/adoption testing, and rapid application development by iteratively enhancing our proprietary implementation technologies and working to influence decision making practices with metric data.
Advanced Systems, Inc.
Technician / Manager | Apr. 1991 - Dec. 1999
ASi is a privately owned business built by former NCR and IBM technicians. Team provided equipment and technical support for a small region of banks and credit unions. Initially took on a role as service technician, supporting myself while pursuing CS in college. Finding an outlet for innate mechanical skills, a passion for systems and automation, and a friendly personality, learned a disciplined approach to providing support and repair services for customers on site. Over the years, took on many managerial responsibilities, training to support new equipment lines, coordinating with customers and technicians to schedule service calls and maintenance, provided vendor interface, and managed accounts receivable/payable. Focused on automating systems, migrating from manual/offline practices to electronic, networked solutions, and plied educational pursuits by programming an application to speed up the process of scheduling a service call, manage them centrally, and aid techs with invoicing parts and labor consistently. My time with ASi culminated in a brief role as acting General Manager during tumultuous times, acting specifically to reduce company debt and team build. This was a tremendous character building experience and invaluable in flavoring ongoing practices.
Communication Graphics
Graphic Artist, Apprentice | 1984 - Apr. 1989
Education
Technical Studies/Vocational Training
Computer Science, Business, Marketing | ongoing
I have always been an avid self learner, pouring myself into pursuits over sufficiently long periods to gain a degree of mastery. I began pursuit of a B.S.C.S. at the University of Utah, worked full time to cover tuition, fees, and cost of living. Transferred to Salt Lake Community College drawn by lower costs and the promise of more focused collegiate experience related to my topic. However, over the years I've become disenchanted by a lack of up-to-date course material and a growing suspicion that the system is more an elaborate subscription business and less the molder of minds and builder of business acumen. (Hours accumulated: 104.00, GPA: 3.351)
Increasingly I rely on the Web/Wiki, O'Reilly, and a cup of chai to move forward when an implementation topic challenges me. And MIT Open Courseware, Ventura Public Library System, PBS, and a growing collection of ebooks and e-audiobooks for conceptual expansions. However, while my study methods have been evolving with time, my focus has always oriented around computer science and business application of it. Through my personal and professional pursuits, I've gained high level experience in the following areas: Business and management, graphic arts, information architecture, user interface, search engine optimization, marketing, testing methodologies, analysis, and customer service. I've also gained lower level experience in working with the nuts and bolts of implementation using the following tools: HTML/XHTML/XML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, Flash/ActionScript, MySQL, HTTP, C/C++, Basic, Visual Basic, Pascal, Assembly. Development environments, client software and tools I've worked with include the following: Windows 2000/XP, RedHat Linux, Samba, SSH/Bash, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Vi, CVS, Word, Outlook, Excel, Fireworks, Dreamweaver (though I prefer hand coding), and Paint Shop Pro.
