About Me

I am a programmer at heart. If you want a formal title, it’s currently Senior Software Engineer. I’m working on software supporting the computer security industry, and I recently became a GIAC certified incident handler (GCIH).

I have worked for small startups, large corporations, and governments. Mostly, I write database-driven web applications. Sometimes those are just websites, and sometimes they provide the user interface to a supercomputer. I have also written email server software, blogging software, and many other small utilities.

The first piece of open-source software I wrote was a mail filter for the Amiga computer. I published it via Aminet in college, but I wrote it in high school asd part of a project to teach myself C in 21 days. (Spoiler: It took longer than 21 days).

I write software in Golang, Java, C, and C++ in order of preference. I dabble in SQL, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

I have also written a db-object layer for storing Java objects into databases. The first iteration used my own homegrown API, and the second attempts to conform to the EJB 3.0 persistence layer specification. It came close enough to be useful, though I now consider that to be a problem better solved with more widely supported frameworks.

I am a sysadmin. I have been administering Linux servers professionally since 2000, and was running my own personal servers on Linux since 1997 or so. I have experience with Apache HTTPD and Apache Tomcat. I run MariaDB (the open-source fork of MySQL) at home for my data.

I am a system builder. I have built most of my own personal workstations and gaming computers with my own hands (and occasionally blood, sweat, and tears). For many years I hosted this homepage on hardware I built myself, but the cloud is easier for that sort of thing these days.

I am a gamer. It’s the only reason I still have a computer running Windows. I’d prefer to game on Linux, but for the most part that’s not ready. Aside from computer games, I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since the Red Box set, along with many othe roleplaying games.

I believe in open-source software, particularly the Debian flavor of Linux, and the virtues of the Internet.

I believe in free speech and free beer recipes. If you want me to make the beer for you, I’ll charge you for that, but I believe you have a right to know what you’re drinking.

I used to believe in the Amiga computer, but that dream died.