About Me

I am a very experienced and talented software developer and manager of software developers and software development projects. Ever since I was a kid in school, I've been one of those people who always seem somehow to end up "in charge" in any group setting. In the early 1990s, with the help of a great mentor, I made the career transition from being a software engineer and technical leader to being a professional manager. I found that I enjoy business management, project management and especially people management.

Opportunities changed after the 2001-2002 dot-com bomb. I refreshed some tech skills, and dove head-first back into the bits and bytes of technology, both as an application designer and architect, and also as a programmer and individual contributor.

Seven Things I'm Good At

• Providing excellent customer service - for several meanings of "customer".
• Understanding technology and knowing how to separate the practical from the trendy.
• Delivering efficient, reliable, secure Web-based applications.
• Managing software projects and teams of people.
• Cutting through the fog and getting things done.
• Helping people understand each other and work together.
• Being very organized, and organizing projects and people and time.

What I Do For Fun

As a young man, I was a real propeller-head computer nerd, passionately devoted to "appropriate application of ingenuity" (see The Meaning of Hack). That's continued to be an important facet of who I am, and I think it always will be.

Since well before the World Wide Web, in the dawn of the Internet, my main hobby has been hosting and running motorcyclist-oriented e-mail discussion communities AKA "mailing lists". I started with Unix freeware I ran on my employers' in-house systems in spare time. In the mid-1990s, my great friend H Marc Lewis bought some equipment and contracted for co-location space and bandwidth through a real ISP paid for with his own money and donations, and we became legitimate. Almost respectable.

We've run micapeak.com and wetleather.com on Red Hat Linux and Apache ever since then. For over a decade, I've done the domain registration, Linux installation and configuration and upgrades, all the e-mail administration and most of the Linux, DNS, Apache web server, MySQL database, and other system administration. This "hobby" hosts a dozen domains, over 50 active mailing lists with over 10,000 subscribers and millions of e-mails per month, and thousands of web pages generating around 5 million hits per month.

We had web pages before the general public had ever heard of "www", of course. In the past few years, I've decided that hand-editing HTML and Perl scripts using vi isn't necessarily the best way to administer a big web site. I did some research and converted the WetLeather.com website over to the Drupal content management system. I wrote and maintain some PHP applications for that site. I still spend my free time working with this and the myriad related interesting technologies, learning new stuff every day.