I was born in Toronto, Canada but lived in Massachusetts for all but the first year of my life. I grew up in Western Mass. and went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the Computer Systems Engineering program.

My favorite project at UMass was designing and building an 8085 microprocessor controlled Logo like turtle. It was about 7” square with two drive wheels and a pen. It could be programmed to draw shapes and pictures on paper.

While a senior I worked at Process Software (PSC) and continued there after I graduated. When PSC moved to Framingham I moved too. At PSC I worked on a number of networking protocols including an NFS server for VMS. At a Connectathon I met some people from FTP Software (while working out some issues with PCNFSD). It was through this meeting that I later got a job at FTP.

FTP Software was one of the best companies I worked for. It is where I first learned Windows programming. It was an exciting time to make the move to Windows with the release of Windows 95 right around the corner. I worked on a Windows shell namespace extension for an FTP client as well as a number of other things. FTP grew too big for me and they were losing focus so I decided to move on.

After FTP I worked at a few small start-ups. At Epicon, which was later bought by Nortel Networks, I worked on a software distribution product. This was right at the time when the dot-com bubble burst and Nortel laid off its Epicon purchase. After a not quite brief enough time at Netegrity, I made the move to Java land working at Telegea.

Telegea provided a great opportunity to learn Java and XML technologies. Plus I was working with a great team of people. A few of them I had worked with at FTP and Epicon. Here I worked on a provisioning platform targeted at the telcom industry. Later we created a web based VoIP solution on the platform.

Telegea was bought by Ensim. The Telegea product was abandoned and the team dwindled. We developed a VoIP provisioning plug-in for the Ensim Unify product. Unify was built with C# and .NET so it was a good opportunity for learning something new. It gave me a new perspective on Java. The best thing I got out of Ensim was exposure to Scrum. I went to scrum training and was a scrum master for a while. The down side was that almost all my time was spent in management.

Ensim had asked me to move to California and I agreed. After renting our house, a change of CEO left the whole team without a job (all VoIP development would be done in India). This left me without a house or a job but an opportunity to start my own software business. We moved in with family on Cape Cod.

After a few months of working on my own product it became clear to me that what I really liked was developing software. I was spending most of my time on the technology and very little on the business. I decided to start looking for a job even though it meant living away from my family during the week for a couple of months.

I quickly got a few offers and selected BEA. I’m working on the Weblogic Console web app. Later Oracle bought BEA and now I work there.

And the rest is to be written…