I bought my first computer when I was ten years old, with money earned from a paper route, and began to teach myself how to program. I knew from a very young age that writing software was what I wanted to do with my life. I wrote most of my programs in BASIC and also became fairly proficient at 6502 assembly language programming. Those were the days!

In high school I attended a highly competitive "gifted and talented" program which included courses in computer science taught by a nationally-recognized teacher where assignments were completed on a Vax 11/750.  In this program I was the first student ever to test out of pre-requisite classwork; the remaining courses included real-world systems analysis (performed for local businesses in the community) and programming in COBOL, FORTRAN and Pascal.

I began university studies at The University of Texas, Arlington and later transferred to the University of California, San Diego where I was one of ten students selected to participate in the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. I was fortunate to be mentored by Hans-Werner Braun, the principal investigator of the NSFNET (the precursor to today's Internet). Results of my work were published in the 1993 Annual Status Report of the Applied Network Research Group and in the SDSC's "Gather/Scatter" newsletter. During this time I added C and Perl to my repertoire of programming languages.

Subsequent to my REU experience I began working with what was at the time a relatively small local company (now a multi-national consulting firm). In 1996 I graduated from UCSD with a B.S. in Computer Science and continued to work with the same group of people that I had worked with prior to graduating. From 1995 until 2000, I worked 100% remotely which was uncommon at that time. In the early 2000s I started writing code in Java. The founders, having had some success, decided to leverage my Internet expertise and start spinning off businesses. One of the more successful was RedEnvelope, which went public in 2003 and was ultimately acquired in 2008 by Provide Commerce. Another was Concerro (formerly BidShift), which was acquired by API in 2012. In 2008 we started ShiftHound, a market-leading web-based scheduling & Open Shift Management (OSM) product.

In 2012 I parted ways with my friends to work with San-Diego based Slacker Radio before receiving an offer I couldn't refuse from Proofpoint in Draper, UT, where I was employed full-time as a Staff Engineer on the Enterprise Governance team until March of 2016.

In October 2016 I re-joined ShiftHound, working 100% remotely from my home office, and I have worked 100% remotely continuously since then. In 2017 ShiftHound was acquired by ABILITY Network and then in 2018 ABILITY was acquired by Inovalon. In 2020, many (but not all) of the ShiftHound founding team members began departing Inovalon. Then COVID-19 hit, and suddenly everybody was working 100% remotely, or trying to. For me, it was no big deal because by that time I had already been working 100% remotely for over a decade. I left Inovalon for Komprise in 2021, which turned out to be a very short stint (only 8 months), though I am proud of the work I did at Komprise while I was there. Since then, I've had a bunch of shorter-term employment which hasn't been my plan -- it's just the way things have turned out for me. I'd love to find a place to settle in and finish my career. Though I do sometimes wonder if I have another start-up in me...

I am experienced and comfortable in both leadership and support roles.

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