About
Hello! I’m George Cook. I love engineering high quality code. I take great pride in my craft, and produce highly extensible and maintainable applications. I’m extremely good at refactoring apps - I’ll get into that below; but if you’re a serious organization, and your code is getting stale, or hard to work with, then getting you back on track is one of my specialties, and I’d love to help you!
I’m really enthusiastic about Roku development in general : really - and I’ve got the goods to prove it :) ! Here’s some of the things I’ve done/do:
- Wrote a beautiful unit testing framework for brightscript developers, called rooibos - it’s based on Mocha, and it’s awesome - I use it all the time to keep my productivity high and deliver quality code
- Heavily contributed to the Brightscript language vscode extension, which is the number 1 ide extension for roku developers
- Member of the roku community group of developers, who create open source tools for roku development
- Contributor to brighterscript language
- Created an MVVM framework maestro, which includes the following features:
- The first ever implementation of brighterscript, a soon to be released language, which is like typescript for brightscript
- MVVM base clases
- iOS style view classes and navigation
- xml bindings
- iOC implementation
- MVC coding patterns
- a new, easier to use, more powerful, better performing list component (wip)
- Which means I get to work 2-400% faster than other devs out there, and so do you, if you use it as well :)
- Wrote a logging framework, tailored to brightscript and roku development, called rLog
- Wrote a lightweight processor, a bit like awk, just for brightscript, named burp
- Started the popular, and awesome Roku developer slack group
Some of my Roku work
I’ve proudly delivered work for companies you know:
- Applicaster
- Smithsonian Channel
- Brightcove
- Corco for roku
- and others…
My Roku experience includes
- Application architecture
- Full cycle development
- Continuous integration, and professional build processes, leveraging gulp and other build systems, with jenkins/travis, etc
- TDD development, and supporting patterns
- Front end work, both general, framework and advanced UI components
- Performance optimization
- Integration with Roku and 3rd party authentication, and analytics such as:
- Google IMA
- Adobe AdMobile
- Adboe TVE
- Conviva
- Gogle Analytics
- RokuPay
- Bitmovin Player
- Youbora analytics
- Cleeng payment processing
- Other 3rd party solutions
- Custom video components and controls
- Advanced analytics integrations
- Graphql, json, XML, and RSS feed consumption
- 4k, HLS and live streaming
- Advanced application debugging
- and more…
Some of my other work
- I’ve done years of Xamarin development, pushing the envelope on cross platform performance, and had a hugely successful blog series and cross platform library
- AR/VR in Unity3d, for Oculus and Vive - I spent a year making a few VR games, like The Incredible VR Gameshow
- iOS, I’ve done advanced objective c apps, making the worlds first AR video editor (I made it way too early; but that’s life :/ ), and a whole bunch of other realtime video, video players, imovie clones, amongst others
- Worked in Banking, pharms, military over a 20 year career
- Did almost a year doing full-stack js with a kafka-based micro-architecure, contracting to UnderArmour
- Was a consultant for Adobe’s own consulting group, specializing in Flex
UX/Business processes/Design/Architecture/
- I’ve been involved in startups and huge organizations, on products and services
- I’ve launched my own products
- As such I’ve got a wide array of skills, and solid Software Development Principles and can successfully interact across a wide range of roles
- Been working remotely for a decade, so I know how to get things done when not physically present
- Take pride in training other’s in the best Practices and Processes and teaching them how/why to be a Principled software engineer
- Have a diverse set of software skills and have good level’s in a broad range of languages
Refactoring failing code bases/getting software back on track
I started coding when I was 6, 35 years ago. I’m as passionate now as I was then; but I’ve got a whole lot of acumen, and natural coding talent. That allows me to hold extremely large codebases in my head, even crazy-insane, poorly architected ones, and rewrite them over a few weeks. Over my career I built a solid name for being able to come into a project, understand the current code, identify the issues, and refactor the codebase, with low regression risk, while converting unmaintainable code bases to highly maintainable one’s with solid patterns.
I love that kind of work as well - if you’ve got a project in dire straits, and don’t want to lose a fortune; then take advantage of my experience, OCD and my wife’s ability to let me disappear for a few 70 hour weeks: you will never regret it :D
Let’s talk!
I probably sound arrogant; but I want you to know what a great benefit I will be to you and your project - I offer a lot more besides these tidbits here. Why not ping me on mail/roku slack group/linked in, and we can further chat. I really like people and computer software and I work on every project as if it were my own: as far as I’m concerned; your success is my success. So get in touch!, and let’s see what I can do to help.
Why is your marketing page so ugly?
I’ve not really looked for work for 15 or so years, getting a lot of repeat business and referrals. I prefer to do great work, with all my heart and soul, and use my time for open source projects instead of marketing. I do however, really enjoy OTT and especially Roku work, so I’m making an effort to keep myself more in this space.