As a kid I was fascinated with computers. I read books about them and made a paper Turing machine. At Boston University, I got an account on the computer, took a course in Fortran and programmed it with the rules of counterpoint from Professor Norden’s book. After graduating with a degree in music, I found there wasn’t much of a market for concert pianists but there was for super-fast key data entry operators, so I took a job at a computer service bureau and soon moved up to operating the IBM 370. In my spare time I programmed an ancient computer to play music through a radio. Soon I moved into programming, becoming expert in COBOL, Fortran and Assembler.
That was just the start of a long and successful career. I have worked with Windows, Linux, Java, J2EE, Tomcat, Struts, JavaScript, Dojo, and dabbled a bit with Groovy, Gradle, EasyMock, Selenium, and too many others to remember. I consider myself strongest in Java, J2EE, JavaScript and Python, but I’ll learn anything you need. The improvements to JavaScript in the past few years are remarkable: with the asynchronous facilities you can use a shared-nothing message-passing design that avoids the old concurrency problems.
Now you may be wondering why I haven’t written articles and attended a lot of conferences and made a name for myself in the software industry. Well, I do have a pretty good reputation here on StackOverflow so there’s that. But mainly I spent the time practicing the piano and organ. I played in competitions from time to time. In 2008 I went on a concert tour with flutist Cassie White, playing in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Our CD is available from Amazon.com and on iTunes and Spotify.
Back in 2016 I decided to take a break. I left Cisco and went back to college part time. In May, 2020 I got my Associate degrees in Accounting and Small Business Management, Summa Cum Laude, at Nashua Community College, so I’m a recent college graduate! Companies are ALWAYS looking for recent college graduates. I have also started on a Master of Science degree in Accounting online at Southern New Hampshire University. So far I have taken undergrad courses in Statistics, Financial Accounting, Cost Accounting, Intermediate Accounting, Management, Sales, Advertising, Small Business Management, Desktop Applications, Business Law, and HR Management, and graduate-level courses in Financial Reporting, Math and Stats for Business, Federal Taxation of Individuals, Economics (both micro and macro), and Auditing. Coming up next: Corporate Financial Management. I have a 4.0 GPA in all these courses.
Your takeaway from this is that I still love to learn things, I get things done on time and with the highest quality, and I am particularly adept at finding and fixing bugs. Now it’s time for me to get back into software engineering. Got some tickets you need closed?
