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 (Vancouver, WA more specifically) since 1995 and enjoy the Pacific Northwest. My wife, Jackie, is a mixed media artist and one of the people behind Illustrating Stories.

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.

• Extensis (Portland, Oregon) 2000-Present.
  I’ve worked as both an individual contributor and as a team lead. I helped with the Portfolio 7 release and the rest of the time I have focused on the award winning font management product lines of Suitcase, Suitcase Fusion 2, and the Universal Type Server. During this time we acquired our largest competitor and we were purchased twice ourselves. We’ve transitioned from OS 9 to OS X and I’ve been a part of over 25 product releases. On the Mac this is implemented in C++, Objective-C++ and Cocoa.
  
  I work in the creative professional (publishing) space as a part of the Extensis font management product lines. It’s interesting to see how that problem domain spans all the way from I.T. to creative designers who are only willing to put up with technology because of the amazing things they can do with it.


• Hewlett-Packard Company (Vancouver, Washington) 1995-2000.
  I’ve worked on DeskJet and DeskWriter printer drivers which was a great 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. Software Engineer.
  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, svn, wikis and product life-cycles. I’ve also co-founded Blue Lamp Software to explore a second partnership and see what’s common and what’s different from one indie shop to another and how the marketplace reacts to different brands. 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:

• PrintSprint, a utility to help make prints from your digital photos
• Multisite for iWeb, 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.

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.