Jean-Philippe Paradis — Software Engineer

I've been doing Common Lisp related work intensively for 15+ years, including more than a decade of Common Lisp Open Source. I am a top Common Lisp Open Source contributor. I am the sole author and maintainer of 30+ ready-to-use Public Domain Common Lisp libraries in Quicklisp. I made the modern public domain CLOS MOP specification, one of our most important resources, based on Robert Strandh's work, itself based on AMOP. I am the sole author and maintainer of multiple important Common Lisp community resources such as the Common Lispers list, the epic FORMAT table, and the still incomplete yet already useful "Notes and tips: Standard Common Lisp symbols" article. See all my contributions at HexstreamSoft, which was #1 Common Lisp site (peaking at top 185k) according to Alexa from October 2020 to mid-February 2021. The site trended upwards for 80 consecutive days (with 2 trivial exceptions) from 4 september 2020 to 24 november 2020, and the absolutely insane site engagement metrics peaked at 10 daily pageviews per visitor, 40:07 daily time on site and 22.5% bounce rate on 6 march 2021, indicating intense interest in my work. I am spearheading the nascent movement to make Common Lisp a top 5 programming language by 2040. I believe this is eminently achievable given proper approaches. Please support me on GitHub Sponsors! My profile there provides a good overview of my Common Lisp Open Source work. I am interested in connecting with (almost) everyone interested in Common Lisp! Regardless, feel free to reach out should you perceive fruitful avenues for collaboration. I have more than a decade of experience with Linux, Emacs, touch typing Dvorak (currently 80 wpm) on TypeMatrix 2030 and StumpWM, an emacs-like tiling window manager written in Common Lisp. I recently switched to the Planck EZ, which is at least 20x better than TypeMatrix 2030. I am using a heavily customized original configuration of my own design. I highly recommend the Planck EZ to all serious computer professionals. I have extensive experience writing responsive websites in raw standards-compliant semantic HTML5, CSS3 and progressively-enhanced unobstrusive JavaScript. (I would greatly prefer to write it all in Common Lisp, but my infrastructure is not there yet.) I created and am managing 25+ subdomains across 4 main websites and my uptime is at or around 100% every month according to my custom public global status page. All my sites are currently hosted on one 5$/month DigitalOcean VPS behind Cloudflare, with plenty of capacity to spare. I am looking to migrate to Cloudflare Workers.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a leading contributor in the Open Source programming language community.

Location: Terrebonne, Quebec, Canada

Experience: 0 mo

Skills

Common Lisp
Open Source
Software Engineering

Career Highlights

Top contributor in Common Lisp Open Source community.
Maintainer of 30+ Public Domain Common Lisp libraries.
Spearheading movement to elevate Common Lisp's popularity.

Work Experience

HexstreamSoft

Programmer (15 yrs 7 mos)

Hexstream Software

Programmer (4 yrs 4 mos)

Education

Completed 4 terms out of 6 at Collège de Bois-de-Boulogne

Jean-Philippe Paradis

Software Engineer

Terrebonne, Quebec, Canada0 mo experience

Key Highlights

Top contributor in Common Lisp Open Source community.
Maintainer of 30+ Public Domain Common Lisp libraries.
Spearheading movement to elevate Common Lisp's popularity.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a leading contributor in the Open Source programming language community.

Contact

hexstream@hexstreamsoft.com LinkedIn

Skills

Core Skills

Common LispOpen SourceSoftware Engineering

Other Skills

ProgrammingSoftware DesignSoftware DevelopmentCommunity DevelopmentSoftware DocumentationWeb DevelopmentDeclarative ProgrammingHTMLCSSJavaScriptWritingTouch typingLinuxGitBash

About

Experience

0 mo

Total Experience

Average Tenure

Current Experience

Hexstreamsoft

Programmer

Oct 2010 – Present · 15 yrs 7 mos · near Montréal, Québec, Canada

I open-sourced 100% of my completely undocumented and effectively unusable code from my Hexstream Software (BahagonTools) era, first under the MIT license and then quickly under the Unlicense (public domain).
For several years I planned to improve these codebases to make them usable, but my skills having substantially improved, I eventually reviewed and deleted 48 old projects I no longer care about.
I redirected my efforts towards my newer, suitably engineered, documented, actually worthwhile projects.
Having learned from past mistakes, I now specialize in micro-libraries, with growing success in adapting my extreme modularity skills to bigger, higher impact projects.
I am finally achieving traction and accelerating momentum in completing my exciting roadmap.
Creating important Common Lisp community resources has been a particular focus of my work, and I will continue to invest heavily in this endeavor.
I am spearheading the nascent movement to make Common Lisp a top 5 programming language by 2040. I believe this is eminently achievable given proper approaches.
See my Accomplishments section below for a summary of my extensive Common Lisp Open Source contributions.

Common LispOpen SourceSoftware EngineeringProgrammingSoftware DesignSoftware Development+1

Hexstream software

Programmer

Jun 2006 – Oct 2010 · 4 yrs 4 mos · near Montréal, Québec, Canada

Weird era of surprisingly advanced programming using nascent software engineering and project management skills, entirely on my own. Several pearls in a sea of dreck.
While working on my BahagonTools mega-project (tools for players of the Bahagon MMORPG), I spent almost all my time doing pure Common Lisp R&D while building my own advanced (but badly engineered) web framework from scratch (using Hunchentoot for basic HTTP). I became a Common Lisp expert almost entirely by reading the CLHS and writing my own web framework.
I single-handedly designed and implemented the following from scratch:
Several DSLs, for HTML, CSS, HTML rewriting, form validation and a bunch of other things, compiling to closures being a favorite technique. Declarative Programming is the ultimate paradigm!
An HTML rewriting and injection system. This greatly simplified and automated the writing of new static and/or dynamic pages while eschewing unnecessary layers of fake "abstraction".
A server-side form validation system notably featuring efficient declarative rete-based merging of error messages.
"flexiconf", a fully declarative configuration management system notably featuring bijective macros and the ability to load a configuration, modify it in-memory and then dump it back in the appropriate files, preserving all the appropriate structure and abstractions, thus supporting the full configuration evolution cycle.
A 25-tables SQL schema using Postgres.
An authentication system. The passwords were stored hashed and salted.
Tons of other cool stuff!
Version control evolution: none, subversion monorepo, darcs monorepo, git monorepo, one git repo per project.
I did successfully launch BahagonTools in early 2010, the site worked but was an utter commercial failure. The eventual goal was going freemium but no premium features were ever implemented. I took the site down after a few months due to lack of interest and prohibitive hosting costs: 80$/month for a dedicated server.