About
I’m James McElhiney aka Bitwelder. I’ve been working in the Boston area for over 20 years as a software developer, technologist, and entrepreneur. My passion is to create companies that solve problems–I love to take ideas and turn them into working software and systems. I am currently a managing partner at FutureFridays, an idea lab which develops startups. Most recently, I was a member of the founding team at Second Rotation, serving as their CTO and creating the Gazelle site and service. Prior to that, I co-founded Boston Compliance Systems which was sold to Thomson Financial. I started my career at Teradyne and have also consulted on software projects delivered to companies such as MediaOne/Continental Cablevision, Fidelity Investments, BBN, and the Federal Aviation Administration. You can get more details on my LinkedIn profile.
I am co-inventor of United States Patent 6115035 titled “System and Method for Automated Audio/Video Archive and Distribution”. This system was used by New England Cable News to publish 50+ web news video stories per day at the dawn of the web video era in 1997. I also co-authored 5 pending patents for the systems developed at Second Rotation.
I am always seeking out new technologies and tools and enjoy catching the sweet spot in balancing something that’s cutting edge but also has a future. My current language of choice is Ruby and have been using Rails since 2006. My main development machine is a MacBook Pro and I’m a big fan of Ubuntu Linux for deployment. I love how cloud computing has made hardware a commodity with a pay for what use pricing model, giving developers amazing access to computing power only limited by their credit card! I converted the Gazelle architecture from Engineyard to Amazon EC2 using Rightscale. I am very interested in Chef and Rubber as open source alternatives to Rightscale. Back in the day, I used to be a Microsoft Windows Developer, using C++ with MFC and C# with .NET.
I used to play guitar and write songs for the band Scatterfield which released the CDs “Mesh” and “When You Were Here”. I’m lucky enough to have a pretty nice studio in my backyard although I haven’t had much time to use it! I recently switched to using Logic Pro DAW software after using Cakewalk’s Sonar for several years. I am fascinated by the process of turning raw ideas and sounds into great songs.
I currently live in Central Square Cambridge with my illustrator wife Louisa Bertman, 2 amazing daughters, and our dog Rougue, a border collie.