I enjoy studying science and mathematics of all kinds. I've been vegan for 9 years and vegetarian for 16. I love hiking and camping any time of year and have hiked all 48 of the 4000-footers in NH in all 4 seasons.
Hiking, Rock/Ice Climbing, Kayaking, Cooking, Foraging, Microscopy, Physics, Speed cubing
I've lived in the Boston area my whole life. I learned to use a computer so I could play video games at a very young age. I remember using DOS 3.0 on a 16 GHz machine and booting from a floppy disk to play Zork, King's Quest, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I learned how to use a command line and write batch files. I also set up TCP/IP and NetBEUI networks for playing Warcraft, Command & Conquer, and other early multiplayer games.
I learned BASIC in High school and I taught myself C to write an H.P. Lovecraft-inspired, text-based video game with some animated graphics. Then I helped my father to rewrite some FORTRAN code that calculated the reactions in the gasoline blending process and used the results to program EEPROM chips for refineries. I took a VisualBASIC course at Northeastern University and got a 4.0. My father also showed me how to work with data in Excel and MSAccess and I had to take a course on it in college, but I don't remember learning anything from that course.
I started going to college for computer science but got a job doing tech support for Microsoft Windows NT Server where we went through a month of training that made the school seem easy, so I started to follow an MCSE certification route while working there. So I studied and read the top engineering books and found work with various companies while studying. Major universities were making their course syllabi available online and so I bought the books and followed the syllabi as a guide as to what I should learn and studied those subjects more deeply than many of the students going to those classes. After watching some lectures, I don't think a lot of the teachers even understood what those books were saying in the first place.
Then I crashed my car, got stranded, and came home the next day to my house burned down. I didn't own a cell phone at this point so it was a difficult time. Then the dot-com bubble burst and there really wasn't really a lot of work for someone without a foot in the door and no degree or certification. So I worked doing carpentry and electrical work on the new house. I continued doing this for long enough to learn how to fix a house on my own. Then I helped a friend start a couple of companies before getting married.
After getting married, I started going back to school. But then, my wife lost her job and I had to find work. That's when I found a job as a contractor at Pearson where I used VBA to automate their spreadsheets, I fixed the visual formatting of their product by using MathML properly, and I wrote Perl scripts to take an input structure and a collection of files and then move 35,000 files into that structure to package their online product. This got them to hire me as a direct employee building webpages some of which were using the MVC pattern in BackboneJS.
I started building web apps of my own using Angular 1.3, but then everything about Angular changed, so I learned React instead. Please visit my portfolio and job history for more details and the rest of my story.