I am a Software Craftsmen working at 8th Light in Chicago. After a number of years of programming experience on a variety of platforms, I accepted an apprenticeship with 8th Light starting in February of 2012 under Doug Bradbury. I sought and accepted the apprenticeship because I suspected test-driven development with agile methods was likely the best way to develop software when considering the life of a software project. I still believe that today after working on several projects using these techniques.
I have a diverse background in IT that began after high school working for a small consulting company in Chicago with projects ranging from website development, Lotus Notes programming, network setup and server management. I continued my education in Wisconsin graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Madison with a B.S. in Computer Science.
While in Wisconsin, I spent approximately 4 years working for an Internet Service Provider named Berbee. Madison Dearborn Partners brought the company from Jim Berbee and merged it with CDW. At CDW-Berbee, I worked with the internal application development team that created and maintained tools used by the engineering staff. My primary focus was monitoring which is essential at a Managed Services Provider. The monitoring platform was and still is built upon Nimsoft (the product was formerly known as NimBUS but that name has been dropped). Under the direction of Keith, I developed probes to monitor diverse technologies and worked on a custom report configuration creation backend.
I moved back to Chicago to work at Webitects in February of 2010. My task was to bring ASP.NET MVC into the company. I wrote a more simple implementation of their ASP.NET content management system which we then used to build a number of sites. Other programmers in the company expanded on this base to add things like membership directories and other functionality that was useful for our target market. While at Webitects, I also enhanced a C# data tier generator that was used with all of our ASP.NET MVC projects instead of an ORM. One particularly challenging project was to write an email campaign system in ASP.NET MVC that used jQuery extensively for the UI (which allowed picking products to feature in the email campaigns) along with writing a Windows service to sync the campaigns and mailing list data with an email service provider (MailChimp).
Outside of work, I enjoy photography, cooking and the outdoors. I think the Colorado Plateau is a often beautiful and enchanting area of the United States. One day I’d like to leisurely sail around the world. The nomadic lifestyle is something I’d like to try one day on land or water.