If you took everything about Bob Clark — a résumé, a passion for Apple software development (Mac OS X, iOS, iPhone, iPad), a hodgepodge of social-networking links, a select cross-section of Clarkwood Software products, and links to family web pages — whizzed ’em up in a blender, and spilled ’em out onto a single web page, you might end up with this. This very page you’re reading right now.

For better or for worse, I have not been much of a job-hopper. I am into my second decade with RealNetworks, and previous job tenures were just over seven years, and almost four years.

• RealNetworks, Inc. (Seattle) 1998-present. At RealNetworks I am Lead SDE (Software Development Engineer) for the development team creating the iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Mac OS X pieces of RealNetworks’ media cloud service. My team is also responsible for the Mac OS X version of RealNetworks’ flagship product RealPlayer.
• Edmark, Inc. (Redmond, WA) 1995-1998. I contributed to Edmark’s award-winning “House” line (Millie’s Math House and others) and other products as Software Engineer and Lead Macintosh Engineer.
  Millie’s Math House; Bailey’s Book House; Trudy’s Time & Place House; Stanley’s Sticker Stories; Imagination Express; Astro Algebra; Travel the World with Timmy; Millie & Bailey: Pre-School; Millie & Bailey: Kindergarten.
• Curriculum Networking Specialists (Walla Walla, WA) 1987-1995. Software Engineer. (The company was known as Computer Networking Specialists, then renamed to Curriculum Networking Specialists, then was bought by Chancery Software... and the cornerstone product still lives on elsewhere as ClassWorks.)
• Walla Walla College 1995. BSEE (Electrical Engineering) cum laude

The word “Lead” in a job title (“Tech Lead,” for example, or “Lead SDE” in my case) may be one of the more ambiguous terms in the high-tech industry.

While “Lead” may imply some management tasks, some lead positions have a management role and others don’t. My lead position at Edmark had a minimal amount of people management, but I provided technical guidance; at RealNetworks, in addition to architectural and technical leadership, my lead position does include managing a small team of developers. (Our team size has ranged from three to six — currently five — during my tenure as Lead SDE at RealNetworks.)

My goal as the people-management part of being a lead is to bring a calm, deliberative presence to an often-chaotic environment.

My résumé would reflect a pragmatic passion for Apple/Cocoa software development: the passion necessary to release quality software, and the pragmatism necessary to release quality software.

If this were my résumé, I’d be sure to include bullet-item buzzwords associated with expertise. Buzzwords like C, C++, Objective-C, Cocoa, Carbon, Xcode, Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad, and iOS.

If this were the résumé of Bob Clark, surely there would be room to mention low-level expertise in techniques like multiprocessing, networking, and optimization, and could mention source control experience (especially subversion and cvs).

Bob Clark’s résumé might include some words about how I am effective (and happiest) when I am thoroughly and deeply involved in nurturing a product through all phases of development, from inspiration and planning through implementation, deployment, and ongoing maintenance.

(If this were, in fact, the résumé of Bob Clark.)

Robert is the third most common male first name in the US, and Clark is the twenty-first most common surname, so it shouldn’t be surprising that there are a lot of us Bob Clarks. It does add challenges for someone trying to find out information about a specific Bob Clark.

Since I share my name with the director of Porky’s and A Christmas Story, a dude who sells reptiles, a major-league baseball catcher around 1890 (go Brooklyn Bridegrooms!) as well as with a lot of other people, a simple Google search won’t necessarily find me.

(The problem isn’t limited to Google searches. The TSA always pays “special” attention to me at airport security because some Bob Clark somewhere probably did something bad; on behalf of all law-abiding Bob Clarks everywhere, I say “thanks a lot, jerk.”)

If you are looking into my professional history, here are some guidelines to get you started...

In general, you might have better luck searching for “Bob Clark” “OS X”.

Much of my work at RealNetworks has been done in the Helix Community, so a search like “Bob Clark” site:helixcommunity.org will find me and many of the publicly-viewable code changes I have made.

You can find much of what I’ve done at Clarkwood Software by searching for “Bob Clark” site:clarkwood.com.

The social networking sites I currently play with are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and a bit of dabbling in Shelfari. I haven’t quite figured out how Google+ fits in with my social networking strategy. (Yet.)

• Bob Clark on Facebook
• Bob Clark on LinkedIn
• Bob Clark on Twitter

This plethora of social networking sites is ... inelegant. Each of them has a slightly different way of doing things. Twitter has its one-to-many asymmetric relationships vs. LinkedIn’s and Facebook’s two-way connections; LinkedIn has its professional perspective; and Facebook has its superior number of (my) acquaintances — which almost makes up for its annoying quizzes and other crap.

And, to make the situation even more inelegant, there’s no good way to social-network between social-networking sites. I see invitations from the same people on LinkedIn and Facebook, and then see them following me on Twitter. (Or vice versa, I’ll send invitations to the same people on different sites.)

Yuck! It offends my delicate sensibilities to have to reproduce the same work over and over.

I am very happy to be a resident of the Seattle area, and my personal interests and professional endeavors generally stay in the Pacific Northwest and Puget Sound area.

• Family web site: The Clark Experience.
• Christmas Newsletters: The Clark Chronicle (December 2010).
• PCT Stevens Pass to Snoqualmie Pass Segment hike.

I have a bookshelf with “Bob’s Top Five Novels.” Right now that shelf includes:

• The Brothers K, David James Duncan
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, Douglas Adams
• A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

More information about my reading habits can be found at the Bob Clark at Shelfari page.

Clarkwood Software, LLC is where I go for creative release, to work on products and ventures that don’t fit into my day job. This is a place to work, alone or collaboratively, on products that fill a niche or scratch an itch. It is luxurious and fulfilling to be involved in the end-to-end creation of Mac OS X and iOS (iPhone/iPad) applications. Among my products are...

• Peek-a-Boo, a process watching utility for Mac OS X.
• Flowing Pennies, a personal finance application for Mac OS X.
• ZibblerTrip, an iPhone GPS app that can act as a speedometer during trips; and thanks to Core Data, it can perform several kinds of analysis on trips afterwards.
• ZibblerScribe and ZibblerPict, finger-painting/doodling/scrawling/note-taking iPhone applications.

There are a number of projects in which I have been involved, from college assignments to just-for-fun tinkering.

• My Macquarium, a project decades in the making.
• Distributed processing on the Mac, senior project for my BSEE at Walla Walla College.
• Micromysticism, a four-bit microprocessor done as part of my BSEE.
• Fallacies and frustrations inherent in account-based finances; some of the principles behind Flowing Pennies.

More Clarkwood Software articles are available from the Extras page.

If you need to contact me without the overhead of “friend”ing me on Facebook, or “connect”ing on LinkedIn, you can use this form to get a conversation going. Please incude your return email address so I can get back in touch with you.