My name is João Prado Maia and I’m a software engineer living in The Woodlands, Texas. I love working on interesting challenges in web development, and my favorite tools of the trade are PHP, Smarty and MySQL.
Over the past few years I have played a lot with JavaScript and Web 2.0 development in general. I think Prototype and script.aculo.us are the coolest little libraries to come along in a long time. I’m now also playing around in Objective-C and Cocoa, writing applications for the iPhone.
Nobody can quite pronounce my name correctly (unless you speak Portuguese), so it was amusing finding a Google Answers entry on how to do it. There’s even a small sound file with an example!
Some of my current projects include:
- Impleo Software – This is my consulting / software company in which I distribute my iPhone projects.
- Houston iPhone Developer’s Meetup – I’m the organizer of this group of developers that meet monthly to talk about iPhone development, trade tips, do presentations, etc.
- Insightory.com – a platform for management professionals and graduate business students to share their knowledge and insights with the corporate world, solve management issues collaboratively, and network with peers who have similar professional interests. Still working on the site and implementing new features.
- Organizer of the Houston PHP and MySQL Users Groups – surprisingly a lot of fun to get to know other developers in the Houston area and share some knowledge. If you live close to (or in) Houston I definitely recommend attending one of our monthly meetings.
- Smarty book published by Packt Publishing. Smarty is a very popular PHP-based templating engine, allowing you to easily separate layout logic from your business logic code.
- PHPBrasil.com – a PHP related resource site aimed at brazilian developers. It includes a script repository index, tutorials, articles and book review features to registered members. The site is widely regarded as the primary site for PHP development in Brazil.
Other projects that I don’t work on anymore, or spend very little time on:
- Dockapps.org – an online resource for dockapp related material, something that was a big shortcomming for the Window Maker user community. I’m really proud of this site, it is very nice looking (thanks to largo) while being very usable and simple to use.
- Eventum Issue/Bug Tracking System – Initially a commercial product that I developed in hopes of starting my own company, but fate had other plans for it. The project copyrights were purchased by MySQL AB and they hired me to work full time on it back in 2003. It’s now a fairly successfull open source project.
- LivrosWeb.com – an aggregation site full of books in the Portuguese language, mainly aimed at technology topics. Users can post comments and ratings about each book.
- Papercut – a multi-threaded NNTP server written in Python. The main objective for this project was to integrate existing web based message board software with an Usenet front-end. It is extensible and new ways to store the Usenet articles can be created to serve new purposes. Check it out!
- Historico.org – a website that archives web development related mailing list messages for portuguese speaking developers. It uses a custom version of a online community framework to organize the site and a few python scripts and procmail recipes to actually take care of archiving the email messages.
- Window Maker – a NeXTSTEP look alike window manager for UNIX systems. I try to help on their website when I have some free time.
- phpBoleto – an e-Invoice project to dynamically create bills / invoices online. It was written entirely in PHP and could generate documents in PDF, SVG, PNG, JPEG, GIF and HTML formats.
- PHP’s Manual Portuguese Translation – I used to lead the effort of translating the PHP online manual to portuguese.
Also, I wrote a few articles on programming that were published by the O’Reilly Network. See my resume for the actual URLs.
