When I take the jumble of life — family, work, hobbies, résumé and some random bits; stir them together and condense them down this is the resulting page. Thanks for stopping by.

When it comes to a web presence and social networking “Elden Wood” is a fairly uncommon name. However, there are a few others. For example, I’m not the guy in Utah, nor the one who passed away in Los Angeles. Rather, I’m the one in the Pacific Northwest. Bits from me can also be found on these pages:

• Elden Wood on LinkedIn
• Elden Wood on Facebook

I’ve lived in the Portland, Oregon area since 1995 and enjoy the Pacific Northwest. My wife, Jackie, is a mixed media artist and she has a blog.

I’ve been blessed to work with some great groups of people and as a result I haven’t felt the need to frequently change jobs. You can snag a traditional résumé here if you’re so inclined.

• Apple (Vancouver, WA) February 2013 - Present.
  Loving life - engineering.


• onOne Software (Portland, Oregon) October 2010 - February 2013.
  Working at onOne Software I combined my love of photography with my passion for bringing new products to market. As an engineering lead I leveraged C++ and QT to create products that support Mac and Windows. Perfect Portrait was the first onOne product I developed. This was followed by a major upgrade to the user experience, which moved to using more direct manipulation.
  
  I also contributed to the development of the iOS version of Perfect B&W. It was exhilarating getting back to full-on Cocoa based development.


• Extensis (Portland, Oregon) 2000 - October 2010.
  I’ve worked as both an individual contributor and as a team lead on the award winning font management product lines of Suitcase, Suitcase Fusion, and the Universal Type Server. During this time we acquired our largest competitor and were purchased twice ourselves. We’ve transitioned from OS 9 to OS X and I’ve been a part of over 40 product releases. On the Mac this was implemented in C++, Objective-C++ and Cocoa.
  
  I worked in the creative professional (publishing) space as a part of the Extensis font management product lines. It was interesting to see how that problem domain spanned all the way from I.T. to creative designers who were only willing to put up with technology because of the amazing things they could do with it.


• Hewlett-Packard Company (Vancouver, Washington) 1995 - 2000.
  I’ve worked on DeskJet and DeskWriter printer drivers which spanned a combination of disciplines: hardware, firmware and software. I enjoyed this environment since I interacted with people from many different backgrounds and the technology was exciting in its time. This included the transition from 68K to PowerPC as well as working on a small architecture team to eliminate performance bottlenecks.


• Chancery Software (Walla Walla, WA) 1988-1995.
  I joined the company when it was known as Computer Networking Specialists. It was then renamed to Curriculum Networking Specialists and later bought by Chancery Software. The product, ClassWorks, still lives on.


• Walla Walla College 1995. BSEE (Electrical Engineering)

I’ve long been interested in how people relate to and interact with products. After all, products are only interesting in the context of their users. Somewhat like an operating system is only as interesting as the applications that it runs.

For a creative outlet I’m a founder of Clarkwood Software which is a small Mac indie shop. There, rather than the deep focused role of a dedicated engineer I participate in all aspects of a software shop. Design, paper-prototyping, code, customer support, marketing, server administration, upgrade cycles, revision control, wikis and product life-cycles. Real life makes a great laboratory. Experiments and data lead to questions. Which lead to more experiments and so the process repeats itself.

Some of the projects I’ve been involved in solely or jointly are:

• Multisite, a utility enabling iWeb to work with multiple independent websites.
• Crittersim, a simulation of plants and animals that’s served as a test bed of technology experiments.
• BinkJet, a BeOS printer driver supporting 45 printer models.
• Co-authored ramBunctious which, prior to OS X, was the leading RAM disk solution in terms of performance and feature set.

If you would like to drop me a quick note below feel free. Alternately, you can send me a LinkedIn invite or go through Facebook if that’s more to your liking.