First Post

As a first post I figured I should tell a little about myself and why I'm blogging.

To keep it short, here is a brief history of my professional career...

• 1999 - Graduated from the Computing and Software Systems program at the University of Washington
• 1998 - Started work at U.S. Web, now defunct (yes, it's a word). Started there as an intern and was hired full time once I graduated. Worked on MS ASP web applications.
• 2000 - Went to work for a dot bomb called Jacknabbit developing a Internet scheduling application for service providers (like doctors and hair stylists). For some reason, if you don't sell anything you become unable to pay employees and they tend to leave, funny (ok, not really funny).
  
• 2001 - Got hired at a company called Freerein, also defunct (noticing a trend here?). The intention was to build mobile applications, unfortunately, they forgot to actually build anything and became unable to pay it's employees.
• 2002 - Lean times in the industry forced me into a contract position at Microsoft. However, I did take the opportunity to learn C# and ASP.Net and my trend was broken, the company is still in business.
• 2002 - While at Microsoft, a friend of mine told me about a position at a company called Intuitive located in Kirkland. During the last 4 years at Intuitive (I can finally say I have a stable job :), I have helped design and build the UI framework that are product is built on. The product is an ERP system for manufacturing companies that is being converted from Access to .Net. We were recently purchased by Made 2 Manage.
  
• 2005 - Received a certificate in Object-Oriented Analysis and Design Using UML from the University of Washington.
  

I am also married with 2 kids and 2 cats. I've lived in Washington state my whole life. I graduated from Cascade High School in 1990 and took a few unproductive years off before starting college. While in college I delivered pizzas for Round Table Pizza in Mill Creek for 5 years (still the best pizza around).

I have been subscribing to some great blogs for several months now and have benefited considerably from it. By blogging, I am hoping that I am able to share some useful information myself and make a positive contribution to the Internet.

As a software engineer, I plan on writing about topics that I believe will appeal to other software engineers such as programming insights, tools, business of software, books, links of interest, etc. If you find my posts useful, please leave comments to keep me motivated to keep blogging.