I started programming in BASIC on a TRS-80 at around the age of 10. At 16, I made my first website (yes, it was on Geocities. That was the only real option). My friends and I even took a stab at the initial versions of Java when we were still in high school.

After high school, I studied computer science at Ohio University. I took a lot of classes, spent a lot of late nights in the lab, and generally had a good time. For a large portion of my stay at OU, I also worked as a sysadmin for the Voinovich Center (now the Voinovich School).

While there, I met a lot of really great, intelligent, passionate people and got to look at the world from new points of view. In order to get out of the labs on occasion, I helped teach duello style fencing and went for a lot of hikes in the Hocking Hills area.

Since college I've worked on a number of projects ranging from applications for small and medium businesses, to embedded software for really large farm equipment (literally helping to feed the world with code), to full stack web development for the Department of Defense. I've also spent a decent amount of time mentoring and teaching thing like Test Driven Development and clean coding practices

I was even the executive editor of an online open source enterprise tech magazine called o3 Magazine for a while. While at o3, I wrote a few articles (some of which were well received), edited a lot more of them, helped build the magazine into a publication read by over 500,000 people in more than 140 countries, learned some interesting new things each month, talked to some cool new people on a regular basis, and generally got lost in the insanity of it all.

As for life outside of tech, I grew up training in martial arts (primarily kung fu with cross training in Japanese and European sword arts) and have had far too many hobbies – everything from drama and hiking to carpentry and blacksmithing.