This is my cat Mochi. He is ridiculous (in a good way). He likes to sleep on his back. 😄

I know, you're here for the "more info" part, but if you got here via the link on the developer page or the blog landing page you were promised a cat and I make it a point to follow up on my commitments.

Computers have always had a place in my life. When I was a kid we had an Atari 5200 and I enjoyed all the classic games. Among them, Pitfall, Q*bert, and Space Invaders were the ones I spent the most time on.

In high school, my family purchased a Macintosh LC with a whopping 32MB HDD and later, to much fanfare, we added an external 256MB SCSI HDD. My best friend also had a Mac (an Apple II) and after school, we'd head over to his house and play Lode Runner (a la 5.25" floppy disk). Those were the days, right?

I first started tinkering with software when I found ResEdit. The victim of my exploration was my parents' Eudora email application -- I'd do fun things like change the mail-arrival sound to something entertaining (don't worry, all white hat).

In college, I focused on percussion, computer science (later renamed computer information technologies [CIT]), and earning a BS in Business Administration.

One of the neat things about my work in CIT was that the focus was more on leveraging applications with some exposure to code vs. being deep in motherboard soldering or machine code (not that there's anything wrong with that -- I've done my fair share of soldering). One of my classes was focused on relational databases and SQL and that set the foundation for the path I'm on today.

After I graduated I spent 14 years in the telecom industry. Starting on an interdepartmental help desk, I quickly moved to an inside consultant/implementation role working on cloud-based IVR applications (before the term "cloud-based" existed!).

Four years later I moved to another company in the telecom sector and spent the next 4+ years developing demonstrations for and presenting on cutting-edge technology at our Executive Briefing Center.

That role set me up for the final 5+ years of my corporate career working as a Solutions Engineer (aka technical sales). And like my previous transition, that time really helped set me up for where I am today.

Having spent those 14 years in environments where there were both efficient and inefficient processes, projects to manage, and budgets to run really helped me step into freelancing with a well-rounded background.

If you'd like to learn about how programming became a big part of my life you can check that out here.

Thanks for reading! If you have any thoughts, questions, or anything else please reach out. I always enjoy hearing from people.