About

This blog is here because I’m being lazy. My previous blog is not in a great state right now. I also wanted to put this somewhere that could handle any load that might come from HN, or elsewhere, should a post be worthy of such traffic. Finally, I wanted a really low barrier for myself to write up my thoughts, and observations. I’ve probably lost quite a bit of what I had wanted to write about over the last 6 months because publishing anything had the pre-requisite of actually completing the feigdev code.

Long version of the feigdev site story, I used to have a Ruby on Rails version of the site, and I really don’t care for Rails (personal preference), so I decided to do a rewrite in node.js at the same time that I was migrating servers. (My issue with Rails is two-fold, number one, there’s too much black magic going on. Two, the community has no respect for the contract of APIs - they are changed willy-nilly on minor version updates.) The site needed to get done for the server migration so that I wouldn’t have to install RoR, and get that whole stack working just for a temporary site. Therefore, the node.js port was a quick job and I got stuck on the security issue. In order to make it easy for me to create, update or delete anything from that site, I would need to have some basic security in place. This required a much larger time investment than I could afford, especially given that I was quickly falling out of love with node. (The problem with node for me is that it’s difficult to write clean applications, due to the asynchronicity I realize that there are solutions, but those also have time investments, and I was ready to move onto the next language.)

At this point, I had learned a couple of things, first, that every time I read about a shiny new language, I have an impulse to rewrite my main website in that language. Two, that I need to have a working site to publish my ideas to. To address the first concern, I’ve come up with what I think is a decent solution, which is to write a very basic CRUD web-app in as many languages as I can. Hopefully I will be writing about those apps here. This blog itself is intended to address the second thing that I learned, which is to give me a reliable place to put my thoughts.

Below is a modified version of the ‘about’ post from my old blog, updated because things changed in the year and a half since I wrote that.

I grew up in Western New York, and did a Co-op with Delphi Corp. while I was in high school, rotating from a week of school to a week of working in various engineering departments at Delphi. I studied Electrical Engineering at Alfred University. Each summer I would work at a different company, and, while working at Retrotech in Rochester, NY, I figured out that I wanted to work at a small company writing software. I figured this out after it was too late to switch majors. Following school, I landed a job at the Shaw Corporation in Cambridge, MA, doing Instrumentation and Controls Engineering.

My employment at Shaw ended after three years, and a couple rounds of layoffs nearly a year after the Fall of 2008. Getting laid off turned out to be a good thing for me, as it gave me the opportunity to consider what it was that I really wanted to be doing, and to take some steps toward that goal. At some point while working at Shaw, I realized that what I really wanted was to work at a startup, and within ten years, I wanted to be running my own startup. I also had some notions of doing freelance work.

I took a few courses at Tufts University, three for Computer Science and a course on Free Will with Daniel Dennett. While I probably should have focused on Comp Sci, I really couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take a course from a world famous philosopher.

Within nine months of getting laid off, after many sleepless nights and a lot of stress, I landed my first consulting gig. It worked out to be almost exactly what I was looking for. I was hired on as a software consultant, also doing a fair amount of Sys Admin work. I did some interesting projects during the first few months and eventually became a Project Manager for that client, running a few teams of developers on a few different projects. I learned a lot during that time, and it was a really great experience. I had been self employed for a year and a half. In October of 2011, I decided to incorporate and started thinking seriously about where I was going with my business.

I started posting projects on my github account, building my portfolio and thinking about what I might use those bits of code for. In mid-January of 2012, I decided to focus solely on writing my own android apps to publish in the market and try to make a living off of. My first app, Reddit Mail was basically a flop, but I wasn’t expecting it to do very well. My second solo app, Pin’d (a Pinterest client for Android) managed to get over 100k downloads, and paid the rent for one month.

After that, I decided that I needed to do some real work again, and I did a contract job for a couple of months, while I was looking for something a bit more stable. While working for myself and as an independent contractor was fun, it typically did not mean that there was steady money coming in. In May of 2012, I took a job as a Software Engineer at TiKL, Inc., where I am focused on the Android versions of TiKL Touch-to-Talk and Talkray. I’m very happy at my current position, since I have now accomplished my first major goal, of working at a startup. It’s also great working on a really small team, our sixth member is coming on board in a week, shipping code to millions of people.

In my personal life, a week after landing my first consulting gig, back in the late Spring of 2010, I married my long-time girlfriend. We lived in the Boston area together until the Summer of 2011, when we moved down to South Florida. I roast my own coffee, and pull at least two (amazing) shots of espresso a day, but still end up at the local coffee shop three or four days a week. I love a great craft beer, or a dram of good whisky. When I get ambitious (and don’t feel like coding), I build furniture. I’ve built our bed, a square arch bookshelf around our entertainment center, a storage shelving unit and a table. I like to read, but have a hard time justifying that over working, so I tend to listen to audiobooks during my bicycle commute to the office. Oh, and I love to cook, especially when I have a great podcast to listen to.