Chris Donnan (one of the guys that talked me into coming to Finetix in New York) says its my turn. I gotta say Chris, I’ve now got an image of you as Ross from Friends playing the keyboards in a bad Kraftwerk style. Can’t say that I have a cool backstory like everyone else (I was a paratrooper/secret agent/firefighter/ninja before I was a coder), but…
- I’m a New Year’s baby. The yearly litany goes something like this “it was a terribly dark, icy night on the way to the hospital, you were the second baby born and we missed the free washer & dryer, and I missed seeing Notre Dame in the Orange Bowl.” I’m pretty sure Dad is just kidding.
- I grew up on a farm in Missouri until I was 12. Store bought milk was a novelty for a long time. There might be better ways to grow up, but there are many, many worse ways. I think next year the family farm gets the “Century Farm” certification for being in the family for a 100 years. That doesn’t seem to be as big a deal now that I’m living in a town founded in 1640.
- For better or worse, I’m almost entirely self-taught. I was a mechanical engineer that hated paperwork enough to learn ASP, Word VBA, and Access programming to automate our bookeeping work. That turned into a role with a project automation team that I was able to twist into an opportunity to write code and the rest followed. I *did* code in school, but it was MatLab (how I love thee) and Fortran 77 (how I loath thee). I’ve always wondered how different things would be for me if I’d switched majors to CompSci from the get go and been in software development during the late 90′s boom.
- I’ve been married to my college sweetheart from Rice for 10 years now.
- I was a better than average athlete when I was younger. I was a starting linebacker and an undersized 6’1″ basketball center in high school. My most memorable moment from high school basketball was having my shot blocked into the 8th row by a future NBA player. Trust me, I know what row it was because everybody told me for the next two years. Unfortunately, my reconstructed knees are putting me firmly on the path to being that guy at the “Y” that can’t play defense and jacks up outside shots all day.
Let’s see here, I think I’m gonna tag Jeffrey Palermo, David Hayden, Steve Donie, Bil Simser, and Jay Flowers to go next.
