I fell in love with programming when I was 10 years old. My father brought home a brand-new Apple ][c computer. Using it, I cut my teeth on BASIC before eventually moving on to 6502 Assembly Language. A Macintosh Plus and an Intel 80186 clone eventually joined my Apple on the bench.

Still, programming was only ever a hobby.

In the late-90’s, after starting a family, I decided to go to university and get a BS in Computer Science- and nearly completed my degree. Sadly, the economic collapse of 2001/2002 put that goal on hold. That didn’t mean I was done though. I decided to specialize as a Sun Certified Java 2 Programmer and then hung out my shingle as a Freelance Programmer. To meet customer demand, I began writing applications for Microsoft Office (primarily Excel/Access) using VBA. After working with J2EE and JSP/Servlets, I jumped over into the (then) new .NET framework, learning C# and ASP.NET from the ground up.

In 2003 I became IT Administrator for Oil & Gas Equipment Corp in the San Juan Basin. My responsibilities were everything that touched technology. This ranged from the physical running and terminating of cables to planning and building a server room, from design of multistore IT infrastructure, to configuring VPN, CDPD and CDMA networks over Cisco routers using the IOS language and SonicWall appliances. I oversaw the configuring and administering of a mobile phone fleet, wrote custom in-house software in C# (web and desktop based) and developed a platform agnostic responsive web application (using Javascript, HTML5, CSS, AJAX, and C#/ASP.NET MVC) to allow customer access to well site data. I maintained our Line-of-Business software on a Linux server and administered a SCADA server for control of over 1000 gas wells.

In 2015, I relocated to and began working for the City of Phoenix in the Neighborhood Services Department. As an IT Analyst Programmer III, I write and maintain code in Java and C# to leverage our 20+ year old legacy business systems for use with the ever changing technological world. I have built cloud based RESTful Services for use with the City’s Enterprise level services as well as third party vendors, developed web applications in Javascript using the Esri ArcGIS API, and act as Lead GIS tech for our department.

I remain passionate and endlessly curious about technology in general and programming in particular, with a current interest in Machine Learning, Genetic Algorithms, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. I am excited about what new wonders information science and programming will continue to bring.