I've been a software engineering professional since 1983. I graduated with a EE/CS degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago then worked at Bell Labs for 4 years. From 1983-1997 I was a product development engineer, team lead and engineering manager at Teradyne Telecommunications and Motorola Cellular. I'm a serious Unix fan, since 1980. My first experience was Univ V7 on a PDP-11/45, moved to SunOS, Solaris, Unix SVR3 then SVR4. I switched to Slackware Linux, compiling it from scratch and running it on a laptop – quite a feat at the time.

In 1997 I transitioned to a system engineering role, which I practice today. I've spun up 2 system engineering organizations from scratch at 2 companies and optimized system engineering operations at 2 companies.

Nowadays, I consult on optimizing data center operations and write iOS apps.

I am passionate about managing complexity, simple solutions and high quality products. I am also passionate about using personal productivity methods and "infecting" the organization with improved methodologies with the objective of making everyone's life better. I guess I'm a lot like Joel Spolsky in that respect.

I founded Focused for Success, Inc. which promotes GTD “lite” and published the Focus21 (j.mp/Focus21) and Tiny Tasks (j.mp/TinyTasks) iOS apps to support it.

I also write science fiction every so often, coordinate an iOS coders group and enjoy astronomy and physics as a hobby.