Me? I turned my programming hobby into my profession in 1994, and I have gotten really, really good at it. The downside is that it has left me without any good hobbies.

I write excellent front ends. I like to pay all the taxes to make it good, localizable, testable, task-based, consistent, and other interesting adjectives – whereas your average Enterprisy web interface just makes me twitch.

But people have a way of finding out I am the only one at hand with experience in bleeding edge, obscure and weird things… so an hour later, I am suddenly working on background services, connection pool balancers, clustering, evaluating the newest Entity Framework, coding check-in policies, retrofitting mocking, porting ancient code from Fortran, diagnosing a SAN, and so on. My inner MacGyver approves.

Then those things taper off and I gravitate towards more Architecty things: evaluate new version of X, or find a library to do Y, or refactor huge project to fix 2 circular references (or maybe 800). more commonly, a lot of them). There is fun in going from “finds lots of issues in code reviews” to “writes the coding standards” to “full-codebase overhaul” to “defines life cycle” and “re-did the build from scratch” and “found a way to integrate 12,000 unit tests”. Note to self: demand raise next time.

Inevitably, we go from moving things to making things move faster. As much as I hate premature unfocused optimization, or throwing hardware at a problem because it almost always actually works, some times are SHOWPLAN times. I have taken a Fortune-low-number data warehouse from “cannot do daily reports because the transform takes 40 hours, we are all going to get fired” to “refreshes every hour with time to spare”. Yes, that is fun.

I do not do “Big Data”. Half the people that use that term have no idea what it means, and the other half is lying their collective behinds off to puff their resume and cash in on the fad. So I’ve taken to call what I do “Lots of Data” instead. Usually it’s “Looots of Small Bits of Data”. Sooner or later I end up owning (run the systems) for 5-50TB. THAT is real.

I love agile and am deft at defending it from the many that do not like it. It structurally forces ownership and that truly motivates and improves. It makes people care. Without it you get, well… Oracle.

I breathe data warehouses, cubes, migrations, spatial data, partitioning, monte carlo, scale out, cloud and more. I’ve tackled – nay, spanked – the vagaries of health care, energy, and telecom.

The above is not a resume, just personal observations. I hope it amused you and spoke to you. If so, you should seriously consider giving me a lot of money to make your software and your life much better. And after that, you should give me a lot of money to me a lot of money to make your software and your life much better.