About Me

Sidney and me--I'm the one on the couch, being directed by the one on the floor.

The Basics

I am of species geek, specifically of genus Computer. Although no person, not even yours truly, can completely fit into a single stereotype, should you wish to form an overall vision of my persona, then the above description, courtesy of binomial nomenclature, suits me best. More to the point, I like geeky things, things like computers, technology, gadgets, programming, books, science, Star Wars, Star Trek, video games, board games, Dungeons and Dragons–you know, that kind of stuff. I also like dogs. People can be nice, too. (Speaking of which, I am often told I am of species guy of genus Nice. You can be the judge.)

Professional Experience

“The brain is a wonderful organ.  It starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get into the office.”  ~Robert Frost

I’ve been in the field of web application development and management for nearly a dozen years. If you count the time I spent hacking away at web sites while I was supposed to be finishing a Ph.D. in neuroscience… Well, then add a few more years to the tally. I am most familiar with the LAMP environment, particularly in writing programming prose with Perl and/or PHP, complemented by HTML, CSS, and Javascript on the front end, and either MySQL or Oracle databases (or sometimes, both) on the back end. Despite my preference for the (mostly) open-source world, I have also dabbled in Microsoft’s realm, at one time coding ASP applications that utilized Microsoft SQL Server.

Managerial

Lo! I have seen the enemy and he is me. I never thought it would happen, but three years ago I stepped into the field of management… voluntarily. I oversee a team of six web developers at Harvard University, a small-town bastion of academe, widely known through its mention in Dan Brown novels and the TV show, Fringe. Our award-winning team is part of the Academic Technology Group, and we oversee dozens of online applications, including course evaluations,  the course planner, a suite of instructional tools, a plethora of databases, and the University’s portal. Being academia, our technological environment is varied and vast, ranging from LAMP to Java to Microsoft ASP. We even have some Cocoon servers running.

I must admit that I’m very happy in my position, and that’s primarily due to the people I manage: A great group  who are smart, creative, cooperative, humorous, and satisfied with their work environment. I’m very fortunate to be leading them and hopefully, they feel the same way about leading me.

Web Development and Administration

Prior to my role in management, I spent eight years as a professional software developer for Harvard, designing, implementing, and more often than not, maintaining legacy web applications. I focused primarily on instructional software used by faculty, staff, and students in their course web sites. For each application that I wrote, I was there from start to finish, often writing up the requirements, designing the underlying architecture and data models, then bringing the whole thing to life with well-documented and modular code. I was also part of the committee that helped designed the University’s proprietary course platform.

In addition to the coding, I also assisted in maintaining the application servers themselves (good ol’ Apache!) configuring them when necessary. Indeed, prior to my stint at Harvard, I held the title of webmaster at a now defunct company, called Xchange, overseeing and developing within a Microsoft ISS environment. And prior to that, I was the webmaster for the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics at Purdue University.

Webmaster… a title I truly miss, both for its grandiose and the necessity to be a jack-of-all-trades. As a webmaster, I was not only administering the servers, but designing web pages, coding applications, maintaining databases, and generally just having a damn good time. Ah, days of youth, how we miss ye!

Game Design and Development

We all have hobbies, and I dabble in game development when I get a chance. Indeed, I spent five years co-producing Ultima V: Lazarus, a remake of a classic role-playing game that rivaled its commercial counterparts in scale and complexity. I helped lead a international team of programmers, level designers, writers,  artists, musicians, and general enthusiasts in a quest to retell Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny as a modification of the Dungeon Siege engine. In addition to leadership duties, my main contributions were developing the back story, implementing the skills and healing algorithms, and designing and developing the NPC conversation engine, one of the pinnacle features of the game.

That was not my first telling of an Ultima tale. I’m responsible for one of the first adventure games written in dynamic HTML, back when the acronym DHTML was as hot a buzzword as HTML5 is now. Ultima: The Dark Core was an experiment in JavaScript, a new and shiny scripting engine offered by Netscape. Over a decade later, you can still play it in the most recent version of Internet Explorer (though the game is bound to thrash the browser after the first few moves).

Nowadays, I’m  experimenting with the ancient art form of Interactive Fiction, often referred as “text adventures”. It’s a unique challenge of game design, writing, and programming that I enjoy. I have a couple of small works out there, courtesy of my endeavors in Interactive Fiction Month, and eventually I’ll share them with the world.

Teaching

Working at Harvard has given me an opportunity to instruct at its Extension and Summer schools. For the past two years, I’ve assisted Professor David Heitmeyer in welcoming students, both young and old, into the world of web development. “Fundamentals of Web Site Development” covers a range of topics, introducing students to the building blocks of web pages (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, multimedia) and eventually incorporating these blocks with the more complex and dynamic tool sets that are out there. Cliched as it sounds, teaching others is a rewarding experience and it helps me keep abreast of this ever-changing technological field.