Leon Atkinson Email & Phone Number

Martinez, California, United States

Internet strategy, engineering and implementation, including: consulting on social networking, developing design specifications and building applications on the LAMP stack. I manage several contractors and employees. Clorox is our largest client.

During 2000-2003, I worked independently for several companies, most notably NTT/Verio for whom I built ecommerce sites. I designed and implemented a solution for selling domains and shared hosting plans for the U.S. market that we later duplicated for the U.K. I also worked independently for Conversive Electrons and many different sites. At the end of 2010, I stopped working as an IC and started doing all work through 18INT.

I joined BTS to help them grow, and it worked. By November 2009, we'd doubled in size and moved into a new, more spacious office. We also grew in terms of service offering, adding operational performance management and device configuration control.

I was hired full time by Conversive Electrions dba Clear Ink as the Chief Technologist. About a year later, business was booming and I began building a team of technologists.

I wrote Core PHP Programming for the Prentice Hall PTR imprint. The first edition was published in May 1999. 2nd and 3rd editions were published in 2000 and 2003, respectively. I also wrote Core MySQL, published in 2001.In 1998, my work buddy connected me to an editor at Prentice Hall who was looking for new authors. I wrote a proposal for a book about PHP, which I described as the "premier" web technology. He asked me what I meant by that word, and I told him I meant that PHP was the best solution for building internet applications. I knew it would take over the world. I was offered a book deal based on the proposal alone, no sample chapters. And I was honored to write for the publisher of the legendary K&R C book.The first book was about PHP 3. It did really well, probably due in no small part to being the first book in English about PHP. It was a lot of work. There was some documentation about PHP online in those days. It was a single, gigantic page that listed the functions. I spent a lot of time reading through the C source of PHP and essentially writing unit tests in order to be sure I understood how everything worked. I found some bugs, chatted with devs who wrote the extensions and even contributed documentation back to the project.On the success of the first book, I was asked to write a second edition about PHP 4. It was almost as much work as the first. Then, I wrote a book about MySQL, which already had an excellent book out, but I think I offered a different approach to explaining relational databases. I had some great help from Monty Widenius. In 2003, we brought Zeev Surasksi onboard to write a few chapters of the third edition of Core PHP. Andi Gutmans wrote a foreword. It was so nice to have the leaders of the open source projects reviewing and contributing to the books.

Walnut Creek, California, United States

Clear Ink was an early digital marketing agency that spun out of a networking company because demand for Web sites kept growing. I was hired for my experience with relational databases, but I was also one of the few people on staff who could code in more than HTML, and I was doing lots of Perl hacking at first. When PHP became available, I was convinced it was the future. We built many PHP sites during this time, often having to make strong arguments for its versatility compared to Perl or Cold Fusion. Although PHP was my first choice, I often led teams in building on a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Site Server and Java Servlets.In my first year with Clear Ink, I built an internal project management application using PHP and MySQL. It immediately generated significant revenues due to more accurate timekeeping. I also built a marketing coordination application for PacBell/SBC.Two of my favorite clients during this time were John Muir Health and Restoration Hardware. Our team brought both of these brands to the Web for the first time using a custom Web framework I developed called FreeEnergy. Resto added an e-commerce feature, which involved integrating with an old-school fulfillment house. Traffic to the Resto site was demanding, and ran with three Web servers and one MySQL database server. Credit cards were processed through Authorize.net.In 1999, I was promoted to Technical Lead where I was tasked with supervising junior engineers and defining standards for the engineering team. I also participated in project management and sales engineering. By 2000, I became the Chief Technologies, the highest technical position at the company, reporting to the VP of Technology.During this time, Clear Ink merged with a traditional, full-service agency, growing headcount from about 50 to 150.

Berkeley, California, United States

I was the first non-founder employee working for Quantal in support of a unique tool that could assemble a portfolio of equities that behaved like an index. The system required a tremendous amount of data—closing prices for all equities in all world markets. I worked on managing that MS SQL database. I wrote custom applications to parse the data for insertion which I later automated. I also developed tools for extracting and manipulating time series data. We developed in Microsoft C++ and made heavy use of ODBC.I learned a lot about the markets working with two business school professors, one from Berkeley and one from Stanford.