we all have to start somewhere. I started when I was a kid and my dad showed me how BASIC worked on a Heathkit PC he had built himself. I was hooked and I’ve played with code on various platforms from TI-86 calculators to iPhones and Macs ever since.
I started my Computer Science education in earnest at Simon’s Rock College (now Bard College at Simon’s Rock) in Great Barrington, MA, far from my roots in Northeast Ohio. I was 16 and we started with Java and I hated working on my Windows laptop because I had fallen in love with Mac OS X on the school computers. My sophomore year at Simon’s Rock, I bought my first Mac, a PowerBook G4 and I’ve been a Mac guy ever since.
I left Simon’s Rock with an associate of arts degree in 2004 after two years filled with technology, art, and music and a large dose of severe depression. After wandering around the campuses of Northeast Ohio (3 different schools over the course of the next year), I found my way across the state to Bowling Green, OH and the campus of Bowling Green State University. I started as a Digital Art student and loved every minute of my art courses. I just struggled a lot with drawing foundations. Part of that might have been the depression or the undiagnosed ADD, I’m not really sure, but I eventually found I could get a degree in Computer Science with a minor in Art without drawing foundations and so, after a proper diagnosis of Bipolar II Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder, I was finally able to graduate in 2010 with my bachelor of science in Computer Science degree. I count this among my greatest achievements in life thus far.
I spent the next few months relaxing and getting a job at a new Apple Store as one of the opening Geniuses at Summit Mall in Akron. I spent the next three and a half years working in a retail store and I came to hate the schedule: rarely a weekend off, impossible to get a decent vacation, inconsistent weekly schedules, it was awful, but I loved my coworkers so it was definitely worth it. But, I had that Computer Science degree gathering dust and so I went searching for a programming job and in 2014, I landed at Davey Resource Group as a Programmer/Analyst working in Coldfusion on their TreeKeeper and ROWKeeper products. I took to it like a fish to water and built the first version of the RESTful API that connects our field software to the databases in our data center. This service handles thousands of transactions a day and has inspired the microservices which are being developed to replace it. I’ve been at Davey for 10 years (on the 12th of May) and I can say with certainty that that API is my greatest success. And that is where we begin… I hope my posts are found to be helpful.
thanks for stopping by!