My identity as a software developer started early in my life when my father surprised me with a Macintosh 512K sometime around 1987. I learned some rudimentary scripting to make sure the Mac would display a warning message for my sisters if they decided to use my Mac!
Later in life, sometime around 1994, I started playing a game called MajorMUD, a text-based role-playing game. One of the problems with this game was that it was very time intensive requiring many hours to gain levels. To avoid spending excessive time killing zombies in the graveyard, I created my first program to handle that tedious task. The program was built using a scripting language similar to C called 'SALT.' It was not very complicated, but from that moment on, I was absolutely hooked. I was fortunate enough to be able to take some programming classes in high school and was accepted into the Computer Science program at Drexel University in 2000.
I started my coding career as a software engineering intern at Siemens Healthcare in September 2002 while still studying at Drexel. I had some amazing bosses at Siemens, and they gave me the option to continue to work while I finished my studies at Drexel. I graduated with honors in 2005. I worked as a software engineer until 2008, when I started scrum mastering and eventually managing engineers in 2010. During my time programming at Siemens, I programmed primarily in C++, Java, and Javascript.
At Siemens, I had to become familiar with Healthcare industry standards like DICOM and HL7 while also learning internal platforms such as Syngo and Soarian. At the time, Syngo was built on C++ using MFC, and Soarian was constructed primarily in Java using J2EE.
Once my day-to-day job moved towards managing, I found other ways to keep my technical skills alive. I have been involved with multiple side hustles and fun projects over the years, giving me the chance to program in JavaScript using Angular, node, mongo, python, and recently Solidity and Vue.
In my current role as owner of Spero Autem LLC, I have devoted more time to product creation, primarily using Javascript in VUE and NUXT. In fact, this personal website is built using NUXT version 2. However, I am confident that regardless of my non-coding responsibilities, I will ALWAYS find time to program. In 2022, I started heavily using Github for my current projects. In previous years, I have used SVN, BitBucket, and ClearCase as a source code repository.
