Objective
To work together with passionate people on challenging projects using modern technologies to solve exciting problems.
Industry Experience
wikiHow Inc.
A company dedicated to helping anyone learn how to do anything. wikiHow has hundreds of thousands of high quality articles that give step by step instructions using text, images and video.
Software Engineer
2017 - Present
Supporting a community of content creators by improving the platform they collaborate on.
- Working at every level of the stack to improve performance and user experience.
- Built and deployed a tvOS app that allows users to browse and watch hundreds of how-to videos.
- Developed an A/B testing system that allows two revisions of the same article to be compared.
Wikimedia Foundation
A non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free-knowledge projects, Wikimedia is a highly collaborative and transparent environment. I work with an active volunteer base on open source web applications that empower communities to create and distribute openly licensed content.
Director, Head of Editing
2015 - 2017
Leading the effort to improve contribution, collaboration and translation tools.
- Leading the Editing Department which consists of five product teams including VisualEditor, Collaboration, Multimedia, Language and Parsing.
Senior Software Engineer, VisualEditor Lead
2008 - 2015
Improving the user experience of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.
- Leading efforts to make editing wiki pages easier by creating a visual editor for wikitext that employs a direct manipulation user interface, similar to a word processor.
- Improved the performance and development efficiency of MediaWiki by creating a JavaScript and CSS processing, delivery and loading system that reduces volume of requests and data required to load a page.
- Improved the usability of Wikipedia and it's sister-projects as the lead developer of Wikimedia's first usability project, which improved usability by conducting qualitative user experience research, redesigning the visual theme and improving the navigation, search and editing tools based on those discoveries.
Freelance
Designer, Engineer and Multimedia Producer
2000 - 2008
Improved relationships and quality of communication between companies and their customers through web, video, and print while maintaining a consistent theme across mediums.
- Produced digital media for companies and political campaigns to effectively communicate the organization's message.
- Designed and implemented user interfaces which were usable, accessible, attractive, and optimized for the web.
- Provided effective online communication and advertising solutions to companies and elected officials.
- Built collaborative content creation tools using free and open source web technologies.
Open Source Community Involvement
Projects
- OOjs, a utility library for object oriented programming in JavaScript.
- OOjs UI, a user interface library for building object oriented user interfaces, including a large set of themable widgets.
- VisualEditor, a robust HTML5 editor that can make clean edits to HTML documents and can be extended to support generated content.
- MediaWiki, the wiki software that powers Wikipedia and many other major open content projects.
- UniD, a library for cross-platform development of windowed, multimedia-rich, 2D and 3D graphical user interface oriented applications.
- Tango, a cross-platform open-source general purpose software library, written in the D programming language for D programmers.
Presentations
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Building a Visual Editor for Wikipedia
Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw @ Wikimania in Washington, D.C. on 2012-07-12
Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw @ Open Source Bridge in Portland, Oregon on 2012-06-26 -
Low Hanging Fruit vs. Micro-optimization, Creative Techniques for Loading Web Pages Faster
Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw @ Linux.conf Australia in Ballarat, Victoria on 2012-01-17
Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw @ OSCON in Portland, Oregon on 2011-07-29 -
Wikipedia's Structured Data Challenge
Erik Möller and Trevor Parscal @ SemTech in San Francisco, California on 2010-06-25 -
How Wikimedia is Scaling Open Source Innovation
Eugene Eric Kim, Trevor Parscal and Tomasz Finc @ Xeorx PARC Forum in Palo Alto, California on 2010-06-05 -
Unit Testing with PHPUnit
Trevor Parscal @ Wikimedia Hack-A-Ton in Washington D.C. on 2010-10-23
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Making things easier to use, one test subject at a time
Trevor Parscal @ WMF Developers' Workshop in Berlin, Germany on 2010-04-14
Technologies
As a software engineer my focus tends to be on the front-end, employing JavaScript, HTML, and CSS; and utilizing common libraries such as jQuery. On the server side I am most experienced with Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL used together (LAMP), but more recently have come to prefer using Node.js and MongoDB. I've also used Windows, Carbon (Mac), XWindows (Linux), and OpenGL APIs to build cross platform applications with hardware accelerated graphical user interfaces.
For visual design and multimedia production I use a combination of open source and commercial applications to work with raster and vector graphics, recorded and synthesized audio, live action video and 2D animation, and 3D modeling, animation and rendering.