: Company : Management : Tom Gleason
The first time Tom Gleason tasted the power of programming, he was a graphic design school grad working for a New York printing company. He'd taken it upon himself to automate a task that took three people three weeks, using scripting to turn it into a one-day job for just one person.
"I got really excited," he recalls. "Knowing it had gone from being an unprofitable job to a very profitable one, I realized I had the ability to solve problems in unique ways."
Since then, he's been a key player in open source digital asset management software development, making more code commits to the ResourceSpace open source DAM project than anyone else on Earth. His contributions there include:
- Customizable PDF Contact Sheets with Unicode Font Support
- Preview capability for various file formats such as InDesign, SWF, Office Documents, PDF (dynamic ripping), RAW processing
- ExifTool integration for flexible Read/Write/Metadata Reporting
- Web-to-Print plugin which allows for customizable PDF templates
- Annotation Plugin
- Ratings Stars in search views, as well as Searching by Stars
- Customizable field display/sorting in search views
- Small and Extra Large preview sizes in search views
- HTML Email templating with PHPmailer integration
- Watermarking and Permissions
- Authenticated RSS2 Plugin
- Pluggable API Framework
He sees this arena as a manifestation of design through free and open communication.
"I had this shift from designing communications, to the idea that from communication, arises design."
His software development experiences have given him insight into when problems get solved, and when they don't. His approach is to keep asking questions, despite the risk of looking stupid. "My method is to keep asking 'Why?' People will tell me what they want to do, and I'll say 'But why do you need to do that?' I like to get really close to the problem until I understand the process of what they really are trying to accomplish. Often there's a much bigger problem – you solve that and a whole bunch of related matters get solved. Then once the solution appears, they go from being frustrated with me... to being very, very happy."
