About

Like most humans, I have many identities and varied interests. This blog by my hacker persona reflects my interests in programming, community, and public speaking.

<disclaimer>While I do work professionally, to have a clean separation between day-job and off-hours stuff, I am leaving that experience out of any blogging/hacking/speaking/etc. that is visible to the community. All the opinions and viewpoints I express on this blog are from my off-hours stuff ; everything is mine and mine alone and nothing is intended to represent the views of my employer.</disclaimer>

Also me:

Hiking around the Rocky Mountains in October 2008

Hiking around the Rocky Mountains with Maura (who took this photo) in October 2008

I was first exposed to programming in high school in the 1980s, though didn’t hit my stride with programming until college where I went on to major in Computer Science.

Over the years I have worked for gigantic companies, medium-sized companies, start-ups, been an entrepreneur leading my own company, and have gone the contracting and consulting routes.

I have held a broad set of leadership roles through the years with some professional examples being: SOA architect, .NET enterprise architect, open source licensing, user experience, crypto, and agile. Non-professionally (since I am not paid) I also have been running the Boston Azure cloud user group, learning a ton about Azure specifically and the cloud generally.

A couple of example projects from my career:

  • Leadership role – as development manager – in OneSource for Windows – first as part of Lotus Development Corporation, then as part of One Source Information Services after we were spun out. This was the first Windows version of the company’s flagship product. I left after several successful releases, shortly before OneSource for Windows 2.0.
  • Key engineering – which complemented work done by staff of PhD researchers at the (then called) Compaq Cambridge Research Lab (CRL) to build out the media search capability of the AltaVista Search Engine. I architected, designed, and built the scalable subsystem that implemented the bulk media downloads (a million minutes per month of audio & video at the time) based on media URL harvested from the crawler, fed to other subsystems for analysis (this is the stuff the PhDs built – they did text-to-speech, image content analysis, probably other stuff), and then used this synthesized metadata for indexing.

Currently employed as an enterprise architect focused on .NET. I work hard to stay close to the code – this keeps me grounded in reality, maintains my credibility, and helps me make better architectural decisions. From a personal point of view, it is also rewarding; I do like to code. (<fulldisclosure>I say above I “work hard to stay close to the code” – more honestly, I live in mortal fear of becoming obsolete, so I really obsess on my hands-on technology skills.</fulldisclosure>)

Coding on my personal time is mostly with Microsoft platforms and .NET technologies, but I am not dogmatic about choice of stacks (there are always pros and cons). I fiddle in many technology domains, sometimes with tools around podcasts and podcasting, and most recently with ASP.NET MVC for the Boston Azure User Group web site – and Windows Azure itself.

My “home” dev box is running Windows 7 with 3 GB RAM and a Standard version of Visual Studio 2008. DELL desktop runnung Windows 7 with 12 GB RAM, an 8-core i7 processor, and a wicked fast SSD as my boot drive.

A little more background if you are REALLY interested:

My wife Maura and I have four awesome sons.

Between Needham Baseball, Needham Basketball Association (the “NBA”), the Needham Soccer Club, Charles River YMCA, and CYO basketball at Sacred Heart Roslindale, I have coached around 25 youth sports teams.

Also have been actively involved with scouting since 1995, as den leader, Cubmaster, Assistant Scoutmaster, and Troop Committee Member spanning several scouting units (Pack 502, Troop 13, and Troop 10). I served as an adult Advisor participating in three high-adventure trips: a 9-day day canoe trip out of the Northern Expeditions Canoe Base in Bissett, Manitoba, Canada (where we were dropped by floatplane into one of the most remote wilderness areas in North America); a 9-day canoe trip out of the Charles L. Sommers Wilderness Canoe Base in Ely, MN (where we portaged the historic Grand Portage); and an 11-day backpacking trip out of the Philmont Scout Ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico (most of which was at between one- and two-miles of elevation in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southern-most end of the Rocky Mountains).

In 2008-09 I studied and performed improv at ImprovBoston. I performed with a bunch of really funny and talented people, first under the name Shocked and Odd and later as Raised by Wolves. In 2008 I took a class in Stand-Up Comedy under Dana Jay Bein, also at ImprovBoston. I performed once, for around nine minutes, and thankfully it went pretty well; yes, I do have it on video, and no, it is not posted on the public web. :-) I performed again in March 2010 after taking another class at ImprovBoston, this time under Maria Ciampa. No, that video isn’t posted either. :-)

Recently been thinking rather a lot about public speaking, how to deliver to technical audiences, how to design clearly, and been doing some reading.

I have a Kiva page.

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