About
I’m a software engineer, with a degree in Computer Science at Southern Illinois University, an avid Linux user, as well as the founder and project manager of Keryx, an open source project to update offline Debian-based computers.
I’m always interested in something fresh to work on and would love to join you if I can. I am experienced in Python, C++, Visual Basic, Java, HTML, XML, JSON, SQL, Javascript, Git, SVN, Mercurial, Bazaar, wxWidgets, GTK, Qt, Linux and Windows. I’ve also done both web and desktop application development.
Background
I got started programming in the 7th grade using an Atari-Basic programming book and my parent’s old Magnavox desktop running GW-Basic and Headstart environment. Getting a new computer at home and this obscure thing called “The Internet” (not Internet Explorer mind you), I quickly became enticed with the idea of having the world at my finger tips. With that in mind, I immediately began exploring and came across this “Open Source” movement and “Linux”. Could this help stop my parent’s computer from crashing all the time?!? Nevertheless, my over protective parents refused to let me do anything significant to their computers so I resorted to calculator programming. At least that could be beneficial right? Better grades on tests certainly sounded like it and there was a great amount of information on programming calculators. So during absolutely any downtime at school and every night afterwards, I began coding hard, learning programming, and a good deal of the stuff that we were supposed to be learning in math class, but on my own terms, in an exciting way. Sure enough, within a couple months I was crowned the calculator ninja of the school and was providing software to students as well as spreading portable software for flash drives.
Now that I’d been thoroughly influenced by open source and I finally had my own computer, what was next? Linux, of course! Extremely nervous about the uneducated threats from my parents that I’d brick my laptop if I installed it wrong, I went for it. Haven’t looked back since. With some serious work and discussion on the Ubuntu forums, we successfully got almost all hardware working on the different models of my series of laptop. Eager to give back I set out and wrote a tutorial that gathered quite a bit of renown on the forums. After several more releases, Ubuntu started including working drivers by default and the tutorial has become maintained by Aldeby.
Programming for Linux seemed to be the next step. So where do I start? A new open source project, but what is needed? Being a user on dialup, I had to manually grab packages continuously or either drive somewhere to use wifi. None of the tools were graphical and were pretty confusing to work with. Summer soon hit and I did not get my previous job back for the summer. Hit with a plethora of free time and dialup, I set out to fix that problem and that’s when I stared Keryx. Certainly I wasn’t the only one suffering from high speed internet withdrawls right? Turns out I wasn’t, after teaching myself python and pushing out a couple of releases, I’d begun to have a small following of users, one of which (mac9416) who submitted the project to Linux Journal landed me an interview and an article in the magazine. Ecstatic with the results, but busy with school, I started to bring the community together and gather some contributors who can help me with the ever increasing workload. Now Keryx is a community driven project with multiple contributors and I am now the project manager. I couldn’t be more happy seeing how the project has turned out.
