About
Me
I am a software developer from Nampa, Idaho. I recently purchased a vintage TI-99/4A off of eBay. It was the first computer I learned to program on and I have been hooked ever since I copied my first program from a magazine and saved it to a cassette tape.
I graduated from Idaho State University with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Computer Information Systems in 1999. I was introduced to the professional world of application development at HealthCast. While there I worked on a small team to help design and implement a single sign-on solution for health care legacy systems called eXactACCESS.
The experience of participating in the creation an application from the ground up was amazing. It was a rare opportunity for a developer fresh out of college and I am grateful for trust I was given at HealthCast.
My primary development environment at HealthCast was Windows client/server using Visual Basic 6.0 and Delphi. I left HealthCast in July 2002 to pursue an opportunity with TNG to work with J2EE at the enterprise level. It was an opportunity to turn my late-evening hobby of tinkering with Linux, java, and open source into my work.
TNG has several large contracts with HP. During my first year and a half I worked on a contract at HP to implement a reporting system using JReport, servlets, JSP, and Oracle running on Red Hat. It was exactly what I was looking for and further fueled my passion for open source development.
For the next year and a half I have worked on another HP contract to maintain a warranty checking application for the IT Resource Center(ITRC) web site. The ITRC is a full J2EE application running on WebLogic 8.1 utilizing EJBs and Struts. In October of 2005 HP outsourced this work to India and China. During the transition process I received several compliments on the quantity and quality of the documentation with the project.
In January of 2006 the TNG Account Manager for our HP accounts left. His work load was split and I was promoted to a Technical Project Manager. I managed two contracts at HP for TNG and five employees. As a true blue developer this role forced me to expand my comfort zone. I have a new appreciation for the responsibilities of project managers everywhere. Turn over, motivation, moral, contract negotiation, project schedules, time tracking, and invoicing all have my respect and attention now.
I left TNG in April 2006 to persue an opportunity at a small start up company called WillowTree Software writing modules for DotNetNuke. It was a complete shift in development platforms and I have been working with .NET since. Unfortunately the company failed during my first month on the job. I was never paid.
I was lucky and at the end of April TNG had an opening on the web development team. I have worked on a variety of projects and consider it my dream job. I have a chance to work on a large variety of projects with many different companies. The team is small and agile. I am really enjoying my return to Microsoft development.
I always try to have at least one or two pet projects that I use to explore and learn new technologies. I have recently done some work pro bono publico for the Timberline High School’s Athletic Department. The content of the site is fully maintained by the Athletic Director and Coaches. The school has found the site to be very helpful in communicating with parents, students, faculty, and other schools. The site is fully J2EE based using Struts, Hibernate, Spring IOC, and MySQL. It has been a very educational and rewarding project.
