About

I began programming back in seventh or eighth grade. Back then they were simple programs usually written in Basic or Q-basic with the occasional batch file in c to protect the contents of my precious 3.5″ floppies. When I reached ninth grade I decided to take programming as a class. At that point the language was c++. Four years and countless programs later, I was accepted to the University of Florida’s computer engineering program.

My first year in the program was filled with all the classes I wanted to take: java, c++, etc. and I thought I was on the right track. However, in my sophomore year while taking calculus II and physics II it occurred to me that the math I was learning wasn’t relevant to the type of programming I wanted to do. I never had the desire to create games, software was always my passion. Needless to say I changed my major and took as many programming electives as I could until I graduated.

For the first few years after college I was able to make a living as a freelance web developer. I created a wide array of sites from the most basic information sites to shopping carts that could handle multiple currencies. A few years of inconsistent work led to the conclusions that a permanent position would suit my needs much better.

After working for a few companies I landed the senior software engineer position for writer/philosopher Mike Dooley. The work I did for him quickly became the most creative and sophisticated work I had ever completed. I built everything from content management systems to e-card system, even a fully integrated social networking engine affectionately called the village which, at the time of my resignation, had grown to over 300,000 active members. At that point I decided I wanted to write something bigger, something significant, something that could be widely used by everyone, everywhere, all the time. something that would serve an actual purpose. Enter Wasp OS.

I began writing the kernel for Wasp OS in the late summer of 2008 with high hopes. It was, and still is the biggest solo project I have ever tried to build and I truly feel it could change how we used computers. As everything is moving to the cloud, it seems logical that there should be a cloud based operating system so your desktop is never more than a  click away. Wasp OS is just that: a web based desktop environment designed for *nix servers that runs any open source PHP software out of the box. It’s progress has remained slow as life continues to get in the way but I have every intention of completing it.

In 2009 I decided to go back and get my Masters of Software Engineering at Brandeis University. I took courses in J2EE, Unix, QA and Testing, Web Technologies, TCP/IP, and many more courses that I thought would round out my skills to make me better at what I do. I graduated in the spring of 2011 Magna Cum Laude and I am now a Web Development Engineer at Amazon.