I think of myself as a writer who taught himself to code for the pleasure of it. Online social networking has been a strong interest of mine since I wrote my thesis on the subject more than two decades ago, in a self-styled Social Sciences major program at U.C. Berkeley. What I saw showed me that the human instinct to network is vital enough to thrive in any medium which allows one person to connect to another.
After earning my MBA in Organizational Behavior, and working in technical and non-technical roles from individual contributor to director and back again, I have come to appreciate the power and transparency of well-executed scrum in an agile organization. I have been happy to practice, coach, and drive adoption of agile practices with great success for many years. I believe in test-driven development and pair programming to improve code quality, increase efficiency, and drive cross-team information sharing.
I work well both within and across organizational boundaries, and can interface easily between Engineering and Marketing. I am also comfortable working closely with executives, senior managers, engineers, product managers, and designers. I have experience managing teams, coaching individuals and groups, directing agencies, communicating with clients, presenting to internal and external customers, leading and participating in cross-divisional initiatives, and providing technical program management
In my spare time, you may find me working on a writing project or two, doing some photography in my studio or on the streets, playing with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom, taking Design classes, singing with friends, experimenting with electronic music, listening to podcasts, reading, baking and creating recipes, or messing around with new JavaScript frameworks.
As an engineer, I get a physical thrill from puzzling out cross-browser front-end solutions, and crafting clean semantic HTML5/CSS3 that supports responsive delivery, structured for Section 508 compliance as needed, with efficient and modular JavaScript. I'm comfortable working in Vim and Git, and I'm fond of HAML and Sass/Bourbon when the team is game. I enjoy experimenting on the server side with Ruby, Node, PHP, and Go. (No more Java for me these days, thanks.) I also have written and created courses around vanilla JavaScript and functional programming concepts. I'm casually curious about Haskell and Python, too. Teach me something fun.