about:jayparoline

Jay writes the leading trombone. He runs the code. He teaches the beach. He hates the efficient hard drive.
Jay realizes the ambitious browsers. He wrestles the clean PHP. He teaches the C++. He designs the visionary code.

Jay Paroline is a PHP Developer and SQL ninja for Grooveshark.

Jay does purely backend development, but he is passionate about making sure that users have a good experience using the site. Let him know about a bug or usability problem and he’ll either fix it or raise hell with the appropriate person until everything is as it should be.

History
Jay has been using computers since his dad bought an IBM PC with no hard drive (later upgraded to a 20MB drive) and a 5.25″ floppy drive when he was 6. His dad took a class on computers and made the mistake of leaving his books lying around. Jay read them cover-to-cover and he’s been stuck on computers ever since. In the early days he used a 2400bps modem to connect to local BBSes, then eventually used Prodigy and AOL back when they were large BBSes not connected directly to the internet. His first browser was NCSA Mosaic. He was an official beta tester for Netscape which earned him free internet access for several years. He “went to” high school on the internet where he earned the nickname “god” for his hacking skills. He made the unfortunate mistake of taking all his high-level computer science classes in his first two years in school. Faced with the prospects of nothing but electives, he took a year off and got a job working as a Software Engineer in MI before coming back to finish his degree. He graduated shortly after the dot-com bust and settled for a job at the library as a computer ninja - applying his skillz on tasks ranging from technical support to database engineering. Just when the stagnation of the library was starting to wear on him, a job opportunity at Grooveshark opened up. Now he spends his times creating APIs, tweaking mySQL queries, debating the beach, adding new features and fixing existing ones.