About Me
My first computer was an IBM PC 5155 which weighed more than I did. My first experience with programming came just after Windows 95 was released. I got a copy of Visual Basic 4.0 for my birthday and I spent that entire summer locked in my room writing code and reading every book I could get my hands on. It was awesome.
By the time I got to college I had been coding on my own for about 4 years. I had used Php, javascript, visual basic, and some c++.
College gave me a lot more exposure to C++ and Visual Basic. I also got to work with Java and C for the first time. In 2004, after 2 years in college, I got a great offer from Cyphermint. I learned really fast that there is a huge difference between writing code in a classroom and shipping software. Cyphermint taught me to always be learning and that hard work pays out ten-fold.
Since then, I've used C# and the Microsoft technology stack at every job but recently I've found time to pick up other languages; like Python and Ruby. I've written two applications in Ruby using Rails (jsVudo is one and the other is in a closed beta for launch later this summer).
Skills & Interests
IT Skills:
I have a very strong knowledge of JavaScript, in almost every job I've been known as the "JavaScript Guy". I've also been working with C# and ASP.net since version 1.0, and I've got 2 years of Ruby development under my belt.
- Microsoft Stack
- C#, VB.net (if I have to)
- Asp.net, MVC
- Ruby On Rails
- Databases:
- SqlServer
- MySql
- SQLite
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Source Control:
- Subversion
- Git
- Mercurial
- Visual Source Safe
Writing:
I love to write code but I also love to write about code. My blog started as a way for me to keep track of the things that I learned but it's also started to help other people, which is awesome.
As far as I'm concerned, every developer should have a blog, even if they don't post every day. It let's you keep track of the WTFs you encounter during your career so that you can learn from them. I can't tell you how many times I refer back to my blog, not only for my own use, but as a reference point for the developers I work with.
Solving document.ready is not a function and other problems
Posted January 13th, 2010 | 3500+ views
Has this ever happened to you: you’ve been working on a customer’s site, writing some really awesome jQuery flashy, fadey, scrolly, interactivey thing, you deploy it, and everything is awesome. The customer rejoices and the customer’s customers rejoice. Rejoicing is had by everyone.
Read More >>
Debugging "Syntax Error" from a bad WebResource.axd request
Posted April 24th, 2009 | 1000+ views
“Syntax Error, Line: 2, Char: 0?. How many of you out there have seen this error while working on a web project? Usually it’s because of a forgotten semi-colon or parenthesis in some external javascript file. But sometimes it’s something more sinister… Something darker, dirtier and just a little bit more evil.
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Testing JsonResult in Asp.net MVC
Posted April 24th, 2009 | 700 views
So lately I’ve been working on a project using Asp.net MVC and TDD to build a web 2.0 application. It’s a twitter-like application that I started a while ago but due to my failure to test everything I lost about 99% of my work and had to start over from scratch.
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Using jQuery on an iframe
Posted March 4th, 2010 | 382 views
The other day I had to alter the stylesheets in a child IFrame when a user selected an item from a drop-down. My first draft was pretty ugly, it ivolved getting the DOM from the child IFrame (by getting it’s contentWindow or contentDocument property) then getting the of the DOM and looping over all the child items… yuck!
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Employment
Full-Time:
Wake}fly, Inc. (2009-)
Professional Services Manager
- Hired and managed a team of 12 developers
- Established new company-wide candidate screening process
- Implemented code review process and paired programming exercises
- Led daily team scrums to boost team communication
Software Developer
Heska.com ( website ): Worked on implementing site in Kentico CMS, won Kenticos "Kentico Site of the Year" award in the Healthcare category for 2010 ( read more ).
Wakefly Libraries: Lead creation and development of Wakefly libraries, a group of libraries that are used by the development staff in various projects. Each project is built automatically using CruiseControl.net and nant and all projects are unit-tested on each check-in. Users can create a release using CruiseControl and each release is tagged in svn, its binaries packaged using NuGet and deployed to our internal NuGet server. Each developer can then add a reference to the newly deployed binaries via the NuGet visual studio add-in.
Wakefly WebHealth: Lead creation and development of Wakefly WebHealth, an Asp.net Mvc web application and custom Elmah module that allows customer websites to report errors back to Wakefly in real-time. Developers are notified of the errors and all HttpContext information is available in the exception log. Later, I added support for JSONP to allow devs to report errors from javascript.
Key technologies used:
- Asp.net
- C#
- Kentico CMS
- Asp.net MVC 1/2/3
- JavaScript
- Entity Framework, MassiveORM, Dapper
ScerIS, Inc. (2007-2009)
Software Developer
ScerIS E-forms:
Hired to be the lead developer on the ScerIS E-Forms application. The E-Forms application allowed businesses to eliminate paper waste by implementing their paper forms
into an electronic document system using a form designer.
Users could then fill out these forms and, using a basic work-flow system, route the documents to other users.
The system featured an electronic signature system where users could sign certain sections of documents (or the entire document) and any changes to these signed sections
would invalidate those signatures.
WCF Centralized Authorization & Authentication: I was also tasked with designing and developing a centralized authorization & authentication system in WCF using Linq to objects, generics and extension methods. This system was used by all ScerIS applications for authentication and authorization of users.
E-Forms Control Library: As part of E-Forms, the end user could design new forms by using Visual Web Developer Express. The end user would load use a set of custom controls that I developed to add various pieces of functionality to their form. This could be simple functions like the radio button list or textarea controls to very complex functionality like the mathematical expression evaluator.
Key technologies used:
- Asp.net
- Asp.net Control Development
- C#
- Client/Server Development
- SOA Development Practices
- JavaScript
- WCF
Cyphermint (2004-2007)
PayCash Remote:
I Designed and developed the “PayCash Remote” Network Monitoring and Management client \ server application: http://www.paycashremote.com which was used by over 10,000 kiosks
that Cyphermint rolled out for clients such as DHL, AAA, and Bellsouth.
The PayCash Remote acted as a network and local system health monitoring system. With PayCash Remote
Cyphermint was able to reduce maintenance costs to kiosks by 60%. PayCash Remote also handled deployment of kiosk updates and collection of kiosk analytics data. The remote updating
system was used to transmit and install software updates on the kiosks and the analytics data was used to allow clients to measure traffic on the kiosk applications.
PayCash OneStop and the Kiosk Application Framework: I also developed a Microsoft .Net based in-house development framework: the Kiosk Application Framework, and a plugin-driven host application that were used in all of Cyphermints kiosk implementations. The KAF was a series of C# Libraries, JavaScript files and even flash .swf files that would allow users to use a simple templating language to build out, in a day or two, what would originally have taken a week.
Key technologies used:
- Asp.net
- C#
- Java
- Client/Server Development
- JavaScript
Open Source:
JavaScript Object Query Library
Jsoq is a port of C#'s Linq to Objects to JavaScript. Under the covers jSoq is a bunch of wrapper code for dealing with arrays in JavaScript. Source | More Info>>
BlockyTest
BlockyTest is a very light-weight javascript unit test framework. Source | More Info>>
Artigo
Artigo is a blog engine written in Ruby running on Rails. (Source Opening Up Soon)
Education
School:
Quinsigamond Community College, Worcester, MA (2002-2004)
- Majored in Computer Science
- Minored in Psychology
