About

...me

In the beginning... First the basics for the people who don't care about the story and want the TL;DR. LinkedIn and current resume experiment trying to get an actual human to respond is this way : [LinkedIn Profile]

I've been interested in computers and technology for a long time, and I've been making things with these tools for almost as long. From early BASIC based computers, to learning 6502/6502C assembly because they weren't fast enough to do anything in BASIC, to trying to learn more but being limited by what a teen could afford and by what information was available. In the beginning it was rough, but it also let me know that experimentation was key.

The College Years... There old outdated systems and computers and languages were abound, and the math to go with it. Traversing Basic, Pascal, Modula-2, Ada (shudder), C, and full circle back to Assembly again with stacks of expensive books I couldn't keep because I needed to sell them for the next semester's books. I plowed through calculus semesters and discrete math and linear algebra wondering when I'll ever use that (massive foreshadowing). I learned about systems security, and wondering when I'll ever need that.

Outside the campus there were more side jobs, pizzas delivered, movies projected, film cut and spliced, more weekend hackathons. Getting my hands on that new Windows 3.1 thing and that Visual Basic thing and seeing what that was all about. Trying and failing many times to get SUSE Linux installed on a machine.

The crossroads... "Continue spending money on college, or get a job in the field or an adjacent one to actually make money?" The wallet won that argument. Data entry, data processing, learning about terminals. From there moving to a large company in the finance industry and being taught COBOL and JCL and mainframes, and getting moved into the PC land again when they realized I had prior experience. VB, 3270 emulation, SDKs for interfacing with systems, because APIs really wasn't a thing yet. Learning that new HTML, JavaScript and CSS stuff. Learning how to do big rollouts and working in a big team. Learning how to do lots of work with no recognition or pay with lots of unpaid overtime. Wrestling with the Y2K era. Learning that the 1-3% raises you get each year doesn't match cost of living or the industry rates and the only way you'll ever make up for the balance is to change jobs. Of course, my resume shows I didn't take that lesson to heart.

Y2K bonus in hand it was time to jump to the Web Development field. Working in teams, long hours, working with designers to build websites for companies getting into this whole web thing. ASP, MSSQL, IIS, good times. Colocation setups at the local ISP/Telco. Company Napster servers, Half-Life deathmatch games on build days, meetings with catered food and drinks on Fridays, open bar meet and greets. Then the dot com bubble crashed.

The jump back to backend happened again, but the startups were falling fast after that, then something happened around the end of the summer of 2001 that kind of killed what was left of the web dev craze. I ended up working for a small company in the AV sector and over the next 13 years it snowballed into a large international AV company, with me as the only software developer that wasn't in the embedded realm. Perl, Access and Apache led to PHP and later C# and Azure. Eventually the founder wanted to retire, and sold the company, a botched merger led to the company's downfall and laying off of nearly everyone. I'm glad to say that they made the long and difficult path back to success again, eventually, but I was no longer there.

I then made the jump back to the educational field. IIS, Apache, MSSQL, C#, JS, CSS, Sass/Less, Custom Components, webforms, MVC, MVVM, Accessibility, DevOps and OpSec, Cybersecurity, Defensive programming, and lots of long long commute times. Then I transferred to a warm and sunny place, and immediately a pandemic hit, and a few years after that, it was time to move on, along with dozens of my coworkers. I'm guessing a pandemic makes changes to the education industry.

These days I'm still building, though mostly for myself, and I've been given a chance to show off the other skills that I've used for years, though not for any professional jobs until now, and showing off my ability to learn new ones by debugging code, building golden solutions for RAG training AI in a freelance capacity. Python and some Go have raised their head in this phase. I took the time to get some certificates in things that I've known or learned like cybersecurity, automation, machine learning, and generative AI (waves to Andrew Ng...thanks for the classes! Thanks for also showing me that linear algebra wasn't a waste of time!). Also, after a long time, I wrote something that wasn't for an employer, or just a proof of concept, finished it, and actually released it (Infochanl) yes it's supposed to look retro like that on purpose, and I've got a large backlog of projects to work on after this website project is finished.

...the site

I don't see this journey ending, and since I have stories to tell outside of my corporate, everything is under NDA "so you have nothing to show on your profile" world of experience, I thought that a personal website would be a great companion to my personal works.