I have been writing software personally and professionally for about 14 years and would like to leverage this experience to be successful in my own small company (I am the only employee) and publish some apps (games) to the app store(Apple & Android) and see where things go from there. You should check out some of my personal and work projects on the main home page.
Most of my experience revolves around Objective-C (Cocoa & Cocoa Touch), Java, C++, OpenGL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, web services and cross-platform development for the desktop. I also have experience with a variety of source control tools such as Subversion, Git and CVS.
On a personal note, I am a loving husband, a father of a 1 year old, a Christian and a nerd/geek who just so happens to love writing software. I love to cook, try to exercise, get outside and away from the computer (haha). I also like going to zoos, parks, museums and doing other various activities with my wife and son.
When I am coding, I usually listen to chiptunes or old NES game soundtracks like mega man or blaster master. I also listen to a variety of soundtracks of apps that are currently on the app store. I usually work better listening to music with no words. Didn’t I say I was a nerd? 🙂
So how did I get to this point? Well, I remember when I was about 6 years old, I got an Atari 2600 and was just naturally good at a lot of the games and drawn to always wanting to play them. When I was a bit older I got a NES and after playing Super Mario Bros./Blaster Master/Mega Man/Zelda and the like I was even more intrigued and remember thinking to myself “how in the world do they make these wonders?..i want to make things like that!”.
As history would unfold, I would come to the realization in grade school that I was a natural at arithmetic/mathematics and science. Naturally, for college, I chose Computer Science to be my major at the University of Southern Mississippi (most famous alumni is Brett Farve), with an emphasis on Mathematics as I felt it would help me bridge the gap in the material that I needed to learn to become a productive software developer.
Towards the end of my college career, I found out about a workshop on campus that focused on advertising some OpenGL opportunities that the university had open, specifically for computer science students that were interested in learning 3-D graphics. I didn’t have a clue what I was getting myself into but I knew that I should take this opportunity to get some well needed experience in a discipline that I was interested in.
What followed was a part-time position writing custom OpenGL 3-D interactive visualization tools for the commercial and federal sectors. I already had a pretty good grasp of C++ but OpenGL was another thing entirely. I remember my first day, they gave me the OpenGL Redbook (back then there were no fancy smancy shaders), sat me down in front of a SGI octane machine with a gargantuan monitor and said “have fun!!”. I’ve had to survive through some learning pains before but to this day, those first few months was the most bare bones, hair pulling, mind blowing, head scratching, knuckle crunching piece of hard learning I’ve experienced. I went on to be productive as part of a small team of undergraduate and graduate students, writing immersive 3-D OpenGL applications on a SGI machine hooked up to a CAVE display.
After I graduated I was hired by Lockheed Martin to write 3-D OpenGL applications for the Department of Defense where I was able to do nothing but OpenGL programming for three solid years. One of the things that I developed while there, was a set of classes to render global data since most of the data we were visualizing was captured all across the globe stored on supercomputers. One of the early revisions of this can be seen on the OpenGL blog entry.
After that, I went to work for a company writing mostly Java desktop applications and it is where I was first introduced to Objective-C, after a co-worker gave me the Mac OSX Cocoa Programming book by Aaron Hillegass for Christmas. I was immediately interested and the language itself was a breath of fresh air compared to C++ and Java. I bought a few other book, by the same author Aaron Hillegass(Big Nerd Ranch) along the way and completed one of Standfords iTunesU iOS courses and decided that I wanted to pursue getting an iOS developers license from Apple.
I am now writing iOS apps for the federal sector at my real job but I am also pursuing endeavors involving writing iOS and Mac OSX applications on a personal level. I love using Keynote to draw up designs and I also dabble around with Pixelmator. I love using tools that help just get the job done.
I would really like the opportunity to work with a team of fun, knowledgeable and smart people where my talents can be best utilized and leveraged to help deliver awesome apps, so if you have a need and you think I might be a good fit for an iOS position that you have open, then please get in contact with me!
Geek Sweep 