Welcome

I am a maker. At heart, the act of creating something from nothing or re-imagining materials is incredibly satisfying. The media of creation is only somewhat relevant to me, whether it be wood, plastic, or even digital, I just like making.

This has spilled over professionally into my career. I'm a Software Engineer... well, I was a software engineer, now I'm an Engineering Manager. While I don't get to create as much as I'd like to at work, my evenings and weekends are often filled with small acts of creation, and some of those will be shown here.

However, while sharing my musings and creations are fun, this site is here to serve those needing a maker, a software maker.

Making for you

You may be here for a number of reason. Hopefully, one of those is a search engine hit that brought you straight here. Other reasons could be that you need someone to write some code, or solve a technological problem, but your organization may not have an IT department capable of handling that problem. Maybe your IT department is overburdened, and you need someone to help fill the ranks with small projects.

You may be a small business, needing someone to setup a web application for you for the next big thing that will drive your revenue, or even a small research outfit wanting to take your data analysis from someone's desktop to the cloud.

For whatever reason you came, welcome! I hope to share my journey with you, and if you need me, I hope to apply my expertise to your problems, so you can do what you do best, innovate and think.

Where I came from

I wasn't always a Software Engineer. I started in high school doing IT. Troubleshooting faculty and staff machines, running cables, punching down network cables in an IDF. I went from there to college and studied physics and math.

While there, I needed money for things like laundry and extras. I went back to the skill that helped my under-funded school district, and went back to IT. I did end user support, mainly students, but faculty and staff. I worked a help desk, maintained machines across campus, and made "house calls" all over, making sure the University could push forward.

From there, I went to graduate school for physics. I ended up at JLab, where I worked on my PhD thesis (I never completed that thesis, and left with a Masters). I was still the IT guy, this time, working on the Data Acquisition systems, making sure million dollar detectors were calibrated and sending signals back for measurement. This is where I started my software career, making a small Perl/Tk tool that allowed my colleagues to calibrate the detectors without opening up the lab. This saved millions in beam time.

For reasons, I left and went into industry. Working for places like NASA and the US Navy. I learned as I went, freelanced here and there, and now I'm here!

Currently, I'm an Engineering Manager at a startup located in Boston. I manage a small team of Software Engineers, helping them to become more efficient and resilient, and making sure we can meet our business's needs.