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I was introduced to computers as a typical user; I enjoyed video games
as a child, instant message in high school, and GarageBand as a young
adult. It was not until college that I discovered programming. My
introduction came during an innocuously named class: Embedded Systems.

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Looking back this is probably the most confusing way to learn
programming.  C language programming on a microcontroller. If the LED
lights you know your programming is working, if not edit,compile, and
try again. It was during this course, that I started to feel the pull
toward a career in programming.

During the summers while I worked on my degree I had the opportunity
to work at a world class research laboratory. I developed the user
interface to a radar test platform. Each summer when I returned the
project had grown more advanced and the programming language became
more sophisticated. Summer one was working in LabView, then we
advanced to C#/WinForms, and finaly my last summer I was developing
for an FPGA using Matlab/Simulink.

All of this is to say that I have experience with a number of
computing platforms, lanugages, and paradigms. But I am always
thirsting to know more.

After leaving college with a degree in EE I decided that I was going
to try to cross over into a more software focused role. I found a role
doing software testing for an embedded company. It turns out that that
looks a lot more like writing word documents than testing things.

I believe in automation. If it will take the same amount of time to do
a task manualy or to automate it, then it should be automated because
that second time it saves you the whole time.

I believe that documentation should be written in plain text. If a
document needs to be written it should be ‘generated’ by a script in a
reproducible manner. We are programmers, shouldn't we program our
documentation.

I believe that people should strive to master their tools, and that
people should use professional tools.

I have taken the time to learn much about the unix tool set and love
any opportunity to work from the command line. I don't thing I could
survive without it at this point.

Source should always be under version control (I am quickly leaning to
love git), commit messages should be long and detailed. Commits should
be small and easily understood.

I want to work with people, who are genuinely excited by
technology. People who feel that it is a privelidge to do this
work. People who want to make the world a better place through their
use of computers.

I am not a front-end web developer but I built myself this website
using the foundation framework. I have never used but have heard of
jQuery, Angular.js and Ember.js.

I would like to look into Go and Rust one of these days because I
think that the future will not be written in C++ or any memory unsafe
language (see also heart bleed, or the gnuTLS, or goto fail).

Dont take my shallow pool of experience to mean that I dont know
anything. It is a big pool, just not very deep.

Do you have a place for me where I can improve the world through
software?