Hello! I’m a Scottish ex-pat living and working in the great city of Toronto, Canada with my wife Clare McDowall and one hell of a demanding Cat called Taggart. I’m also a photographer, musician and songwriter. I dabble in design and information architecture. I currently work as Development Manager and Lead Systems Developer at BuzzData.

I’ve recently held the position of Chief Technical Officer twice, for companies dealing with huge government contracts through to startups building new products. I’ve worked as a Development Manager and Technical Architect. In 2007 I started my own software consultancy which I ran until early 2009.

I’ve built and managed the construction of large software projects in .NET and Rails, the challenges involved in scaling them and in managing the teams that build them.

I do not tolerate fools gladly.

I try to follow a life of Kaizen.

I created the following:

• http://www.thedeskbook.com.
• The Ruby Gem time_remaining for rolling average time remaining calculations.
• The Ruby Gem rakins for wrapping bundle exec and pals with Raccoons.
• The educational site DelimitedFileFormats.info.
• The release process tool, The Beast Master for tracking deployments.

Write to me at john at mcdowall dot info. I love chatting to new people.