My tech experience started with doing things in DOS on my family’s computer, and basic shape drawing.
Then I eventually got my own one piece Mac and started building things in Apple’s HyperCard program that wasn’t unlike webpages actually, and did some basic programming for buttons / sounds etc.
Near the time of college I started doing more with hardware, swapping hard drives / plugging internals in.
I built my first website and learned about Javascript and HTML.
While attending the first school where I majored in Computer Information Systems, at the suggestion of a family friend, I tried to volunteer to work in the IT department and ended up getting offered a part-time job.
While I was working in that position, I wrote a Perl CGI web application to document the college’s network port connections, and used it to go into networking closets and enter in the connection data into my software.
During that first college time I also hosted my own webserver at home and learned about the LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP).
- Career Start
After I finished my Bachelors degree, I got a job at the first school I attended as a network administrator, doing policy enforcement and at the end of the time there worked on a web content management project using Joomla if I remember correctly. Attending requirement and feedback meetings and then going back and working on things.
After that I got hired on as the college’s webmaster.
One of the interesting projects I worked on in that position was an online campus tour where I went around with a 360 camera lens, and then used the photos where people could explore the campus facilities by clicking on a 3D view of the campus to use the 360 view.
And as an independent contract project for the college’s workforce development department I developed a custom web training scheduling application. The application was installed for multiple counties (multi-campus state college system).
- Web Software Developer
Here are some things I did in my next positions:
I developed a web front-end for an advertising platform.
And I worked on a web application with a team that was maintaining a feedback framework as a government sub-contractor.
Developed / maintained web software for a e-commerce company.
Implemented web designs on Drupal for a political consulting company.
Maintained web software for a logistics shipping company.
Developed and maintained web software for a non-profit.
And at that time I got more into data where I was the data go-to person creating and maintaining Tableau reports.
This is when I starting using Python more and built data ingestion scripts.
At this time I used a more formal deployment system that included development, staging, and production servers that had Jeeves deployment scripts and processes.
At the latter part of this period I joined an startup effort as a technical co-founder and moved to California, and worked on this overlapping some of my software developer roles.
The ventures goal was to use natural language analysis to process and provide analysis and predictions from movie scripts.
The effort ended up not getting funded, but provided extra insights into the software business world.
- A new era
After those things I got engaged, married, and moved to South Korea where I’m based now.
I did a bit of web contracting, and this led into the time where I started to use more Python, and eventually got into AI related things.
Here’s a link highlighting some things I’ve worked on and posted to GitHub:
/my-github-repos/
I’m working on a long-term robotics project that involves micro processor programming, motor control, and will involve machine vision.
In the meantime hopefully I can get more into Python programming, perhaps some back-end application building / industrial applications.
