At work I was given the fun task of writing my own personal biography. Here are two rough drafts:
Fun Version
My mom tells me that as soon as I could stand up to reach the volume for the stereo that I was playing with knobs and pushing buttons as often as I could. In the 9th grade I built 30 computers for my electrical engineering class to solve a long running problem with boredom. Before I graduated high school I had become an accomplished NetWare sys admin, gotten a decent understanding of network design and implementation and learned the basics of the craft of programming. After high school, to cure the boredom that system administration had become, I took on some fun projects on dealing with the inefficiencies that Quickbooks had at the time in it’s bidding system. My next project was spending 3 years working on a custom management application for a financial planning group, which proved to be a strong competitive advantage for the operation for many years. Towards the end of my project I started questioning if software engineering was what I wanted my career to be so I took an opportunity with a friend that led me into 5 years of audio/visual production. During that 5 years I used my programming experience to help build automation tools and filled my free time with random development projects that would come my way. It was during that 5 year period that I discovered my love for DJing, which for a few years I worked on as diligently as I have any of my other jobs I’ve held. After my brief sojourn from the software development world, when the opportunity presented itself to get back into it full time, I jumped on it. For the past 4 years I’ve been a hard core engineer, working on stretching the limits of the Microsoft development stack. And I’ve played and mastered every Call of Duty from the past 6 years. To me, the release of a new Call of Duty title beats the exhilaration of both the 4th of July and Christmas combined.
“Professional” Version
A self-described nerd, I’ve been working on designing and implementing systems since 1995. In high school, mostly as a way to cure boredom, I built entire computer labs from scratch and put together the networks for those labs. Since then I’ve been particularly interested in the development of financial applications, starting with the construction of bidding systems that tied into QuickBooks, extension and automation tools for QuickBooks and then moving into a custom portfolio management system for a financial planning group. After spending 3 years working on the portfolio management system, the opportunity to work in another arena that I had a strong passion for, audio/visual production, presented itself and I spent a few years developing my skills in that realm. The completion of my final project in the A/V realm, the building of a broadcast studio, led me back into full-time software development with the building of reporting and distribution system patterned after ESPN.Com. Along the way I’ve mastered the fine art of DJing, shooting terrorists (or at least the ones that are present in Call of Duty) and fantasy football.
