Detailed Timeline

Early Work Related Background (1990 - 1992):

• I graduated High School in 1990 while working as manager for the county recycling center, a member of the county health board solid waste management committee, and a small business owner.
• I invented the process for differentiating polyvinyl chloride consumer plastic bottles (#3 PVC) from polyethylene terephthalate (#1 PET/PETE) bottles in the recycling industry in 1990
• I started a newspaper recycling business that turned newspaper into a hay substitute in 1991.
• I Started a pallet recycling business (in-house) for Eaglebrook Plastics, Inc. in 1992.

Early computer related background (1992 - 1998):

• My first work related program was building a system in Novell Netware Lotus 123 for National Polystyrene Recycling Company, LLC. I was the Quality Control Manager at the time. I was required to provide a wide variety of chemical and physical tests for the recycled content we were making at this company. My job was to report to the scientific departments of our corporate partners (companies like Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobile, DuPont, etc.). So, I built a system that tracked every lot of material from it's source all the way through the recycling process into extruded plastic pellets. Later, as plant supervisor I enhanced the program to track the production rates of every employee working for the company. This was in response to my boss, at the time, refusing to budge for a 25 cent raise for various workers under me -claiming that he did not know their productivity. I raised production of the company 35% in 2 months with this program. I won my workers more money... and then the company was sold so I moved on....

• During 1992 I began studying C/C++ and computer administration -self taught.
  • Continued to study computer related information and leaned skills while working as a printing press operator and forklift driver.
  • Began learning 'scripting' languages at this time also (i.e. perl, bash, sh, ksh, born, html, awk, sed, etc.)
  • Started working with Linux v1.0 at this time.
  • Personal Projects Included:
    • Lots of dumpster diving for scrapped computer parts -and building those systems for sale or barter.
    • Freelance computer administration and programming for small businesses (i.e. custom databases, websites, security systems, etc.).
    • Development of an early video compression library (never published) that streamed 23+ frames per second over high compression modem lines.
• I started my first computer related job in 1995 as a Systems Engineer for SCO Unix operated Medical Billing Systems.
  • Gained a great deal of experience working with, installing, wiring and maintaining a wide variety of hardware such as:
    • Serial terminal, printers and multiplexed serial networks.
    • Telephony including building patch panels and networks, remote modem access networks,
    • Building and maintaining various computer hardware systems: SCSI internal and external RAID systems, token ring and Ethernet networks, etc.
  • Gained a wide range of experience with various operating systems -installation and administration:
    • Unixes: SCO, HPUX, ATT, Xenix, Linux, Solaris.
    • Other: Novel Netware, MS Dos 3.0 - 6.0, MS Windows 3.0 - '95' and NT server.

1998 - 2008

• I bounced around from interesting project to interesting project. Most of the small/medium sized companies I've worked for have been bought out.
• For over 10 years I contracted as a C/C++ developer for the likes of:
  • Lucent Technologies as a C/C++ Software Engineer.
  • Verascape, first company to use develop a voicexml phone product -the basis of our phone automation today.
  • Helios Trading when they were bought out by Bear Sterns for our automated trading system for the ISE (I was lead developer).
  • Market Systems, Inc (now part of Thomson Financial) as C, C++, Java, Python Software Engineer and later Systems Engineer as well.
  • DoubleClick as a Perl developer, literally, when they were bought out by Google (I lost my contract of course).

2009 - 2018

• I started work for Wolfram Research / Wolfram-Alpha January 2009 as a Perl developer. That position quickly turned into my taking over as Release Engineering Manager for both companies and all of their products.
• In 2013 I stated work for R-Systems as a Systems Engineer so that I could become more acquainted with HPC (High Performance Computing).
• After R-Systems I took some time off from the I.T. industry to spend time with my Son, re-calibrate with my life goals, and prepare myself to develop new software again.
• Now I'm pretty much starting over with my career with a new focus on working for a stable company and the confidence that 20+ years of experience affords me.