About Me

I consider myself to be a software developer and problem solver. I began my journey as a developer trainer at NeXT Computer where I taught NeXT's Developer Camp and co-founded their Mentorship Program. My friends and I left NeXT to start a training and consulting company called Paradigm Research (PRI) which we grew to over a million dollars in annual revenue before we sold it to a soon to be defunct Internet consulting company. That was the beginning of the Internet bust, and to be honest, we got out just in time. While we lost some money, we learned a lot. My main regret is that the people we hired weren't treated better by their new boss, who, it turns out, was horrible at business.

After leaving PRI, I began working at TIBCO Software, where I lead the development of the Designer platform. Designer is a graphical interface that unified the TIBCO product suites. While at TIBCO I lead development of the user interface for Business Works, their unique and, if I might say so, very powerful visual programming environment for business analysts. I was a member of TIBCO's Horizontal Architecture Committee for many years and pushed the company toward a number of new technologies. During my last few years at TIBCO I worked with the messaging group to build a user friendly configuration interface. The last project I worked on was released under the name eFTL and provided a bridge between web sockets and FTL. I developed the initial version of this bridge including designing the algorithms for optimizing message parsing and message matching.

In July 2013 I joined Fog Creek Software. In the fall of 2014 I took over as the team leader for the Kiln team for a few months during a reorganization. After we streamlined the management structure, I returned to the technical staff to work on Kiln and FogBugz. In April 2015 Fog Creek and I decided to part ways.

In June 2015 I joined Google as an engineer. After a few months, and some discussions with my boss, I took on a management role and managed one and then two teams in the Brand Lift organization. During my time at Google I onboarded several new hires, helped a few of my team members get promotions, helped some others transfer to new teams, and oversaw a lot of great software development. Ultimately I left Google in May 2018 due to the commute. I was spending 3-4 hours a day on the road and just couldn't do it any more.

With a little help from friends I joined Synadia at the end of May, 2018.

Along the way, I earned a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering with a dissertation entitled Multi-Grid Genetic Algorithms For Optimal Radiation Shield Design. My dissertation introduced a novel form of genetic algorithms and applied them to shield design. I also earned a fourth degree black belt in Jang Mu Won Hapkido, a challenge and sometimes painful experience. Although it would be hard to say which was more challenging, or painful. I also wrote eight books, if you count second editions, on topics ranging from Perl to Enterprise Java.

Below are descriptions of some of the projects I have worked on over the last twenty years. Projects are listed in reverse chronological order with a context in parenthesis by the title. All work projects are labeled (work). In some cases, the dates are approximate. Click on the title to see more details about the project.