About Me

My name is Tim Jarrett and I am a Software Engineer with Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, MD. I have more than seven years of experience designing, developing, implementing, and maintaining secure, standards complaint, and cross platform compatible web applications.

I have worked with a bevy of development languages and tools including almost every flavor of *nix, Apache and IIS, MySQL, Oracle, and MS SQL Server, PHP, Java, and C#.NET. I am also a ninja when working with Javascript/AJAX and CSS and, while I prefer prototype I am familiar with jquery and other javascript libraries.

In addition to my full time work with JHU Engineering for Professionals (EP) I am either working towards my Master's of Science in Computer Science at JHU EP, freelance, or hacking away at some PHP, Javascript, or iPhone application project.

Two of my most famous projects to date, Gmail Signature Float (GSF) and Google Apps Themes (GAT) where greasemonkey scripts that extended the functionality of Gmail. Gmail Signature Float, in it's prime, had more than 50,000 users. It was used to manipulate Gmail's signature functionality. In particular, it allowed the user to "float" the signature above any quoted response and allowed other functionality like HTML in the signature.

Google Apps Themes brought themes to Google Apps. A smaller and more short-lived project it none-the-less had about 300 users.

Both scripts where discontinued because Google saw fit to build the functionality that the scripts provided directly in to Gmail

Another interesting project that I get a lot of email about is a clone of Facebook's "Compose To" contact hinting tool. I call it SearchList. It's useful for replacing select boxes that have hundreds of options in them. Instead, you provide what looks like an input text field, and as users type into the box, options are displayed below it.

Finally, over the years I've developed a PHP library of code that all call Wmt. Wmt takes functionality build into Pear and Zend Framework and extends it or wraps it in convenient objects. I'm particular proud of the Wmt_Object_Db class which provides a nice CRUD through a nice ORM to descendant objects.

There are several more interesting projects that are on going, to see more, please check out my Labs page.