I've been a professional software developer for 38 years. I've worked for everything from large corporations with tens of thousands of employees to small companies with 3 paid staff and a few volunteers. I've seen a lot of software come and go, and I've personally witnessed most of the trends in the software industry. It's been a wonderful, horrible, fun, rewarding, frustrating, crazy roller coaster ride. I want more!

I've interviewed dozens of candidates, onboarded and trained new employees, initiated strategic marketing shifts, guided tech support and sales, performed dozens of exhaustive technical reviews of documentation, led user interface redesigns, and guided rookie project managers, negotiated licensing approaches with product line management, and protected employee morale in times of crisis. I've traveled thousands of miles to visit with my employer’s largest and most important customers, to hear their concerns, collect feedback and share our future plans with those paying dearly for our time.

Throughout all of that, I have somehow managed to remain focused on technical development; by choice, I've worn additional hats from time to time, but I’ve also been a software developer the whole time. I've learned the software development lessons; I can recognize unnecessary complexity, feature creep, technical debt, and unrealistic schedules and feature lists. Whenever there’s a project in technical trouble, I’m usually assigned to find a simpler and more successful path forward.

Yet what experience has taught me is that, as the industry grows and widens, we individually know less and less of the total as each year passes. So learning is a constant opportunity and responsibility. More importantly, we are often forced to specialize, and therefore we work best as a team, with complementary skills. I still crave learning. Recently I've turned that experience and passion towards new goals, at a new employer.

In my spare time I like music, including songwriting and experimenting with digital audio workstation software, getting out in nature, and relaxing in my rural yard with my partner Vikki and our two cats, Loki and Mathilda. I also enjoy writing and recording music, and have a home development project with the goal of helping authors create books of various types and genres.