I was born in Bremerton, Washington. Shortly thereafter, my family moved to Louisiana and stayed there for approximately four years. By that time my brother was born, and my dad found a job in, you guessed it, Bremerton! (yippie) So we moved back to Bremerton and have stayed there ever since.
But I got older, and decided that a college career was in order. I applied to USC, Occidental, OSU, and WWU and was accepted to them all. USC was my top choice as they had a very extensive Computer Science department (at least, compared to the others) and good professors, although I must admit that I only met one. Unfortunately, My dad didn’t have the $$$ for USC or Occidental (my second choice) and I couldn’t get any financial aid. OSU had accepted me despite my two day late application, but only for the following quarter, and I wasn’t about to spend an extra quarter in Bremerton. So I went to WWU, not my first choice but a safe fallback.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I was very compatible with WWU. I found all but two of their professors terribly tied up with the pressures of Publish, Publish, Publish! A few had even flat out told the students that they were at the bottom of the totem pole. I was finally getting into Object Oriented Programming with a passion and only one was teaching it, and he just learned it (and not too well in retrospect). So I decided that I wasn’t going back.
That is how I ended up at TESC. All in all, the school isn’t bad. There are some things I didn’t like, but some things that I love. The CS dept isn’t near as big as WWU’s, but they ALL want to teach, and I like that. I took two main courses there: Computability & Cognition taught by Al Liesenring and Student Originated Software headed by Judith Berard Cushing. Both courses are considered upper division computer science courses. I will expand on these courses more later.
I finally graduated from TESC in June 1996 and left for Portland, Oregon immediately thereafter. I worked for Gemstone doing QA for them. I have done a number of things for Gemstone. I have performed regular QA duties for Gemstone/S, their smalltalk product. I also lead the QA efforts on Gemstone/J, their java product. That involved working with JavaSoft performing JCK testing (conformance tests, that ALL licensee’s, including microsoft, have to pass in order to market the product as being java compatible), creating our own suite of tests and the tools to run them.
In January 1998, I quit Gemstone and moved to Seattle for personal reasons. I started contracting for an Internet startup company called JoeAverage.com doing web programming in ASP (YUCK–I will NEVER develop on a windows platform again). But in June 1998, JA’s attempts at a second round of financing failed. In July, JA hired me back with a subtantiantial raise in order to prepare the website to sell to another company. This too failed (not my fault).
On Sept 1, 1998, I started working at Amazon.com. I loved it there for a while. Then they got huge and the peter principal kicked in big time. Eventually I quit and took 3 glorious months off.
On Sept 1, 2002, I started working at Omni Group. In December of 1998 I had declared that Omni Group was the next place I was going to work. It took a while, but it happened. Half the pay, and twice the happiness.