About

I grew up in the Washington D.C. suburbs after my family moved here in the summer of 1980. Growing up. I played both basketball and baseball, but wasn’t really any good at either. Something about needing to have good hand-eye coordination. My first computer was a Texas Instrumetns 99/4a, on which I learned to program in BASIC. Those were the days – 8kb of memory! Later, sometime in the sixth grade I upraded to a Commodore 64. I attended St. James Catholic School in Falls Church, VA from kindergarten all the way through the eighth grade. I attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, VA, graduating in 1993.

After TJ, I was accepted into the Architecture program at Virginia Tech. One week into my collegiate carrer, I realized I didn’t want to be an architect and managed to switch to the School of Engineering. I received a Bachelors of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering in 1997, and stayed to attend the graduate program in the same department. I graduated from Virginia Tech in 2000 with a Masters of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering. My thesis project evaluated the efficacy of Computer Aided Instruction for a sophomore level course in Engineering Economics.

Work

I was hired out of college by Forum One Communications. Where I worked for 8 years, despite not knowing PHP or SQL when I started. I had a rudimentary grasp of classic ASP, . We build web sites for our clients using LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP).

At the end of 2008, I started working at D.C. United, to join the Digital Media team and re-launch the team’s site on Drupal.  It was difficult to not turn down a job which joined my geeky and sporting interests at the hip.

I left D.C. United in 2011 to join a startup, mojoLive, although that only lasted until the summer of 2012. In August 2012, I co-founded at musketeers.me.

Interests

After Bolivia qualified for the World Cup held in the United States in 1994, I became a huge soccer fan and follow DC United, and the national teams from the USA and Bolivia. While in Blacksburg, I spent a lot (a lot!) of time playing on the Drill Field and around Blacksburg. I met many of my closest friends through soccer, and eventually through them I met my wife Staci.

I’m interested in programming in general, although focus chiefly on web/php programming. Recently I’ve started learning Python. I also take care of the system admin tasks for the server hosting this site. I’ve learned much about Email servers (Postfix/Dovecot), DNS (Bind), fighting spam, and keeping hackers out. When I want to relax, I also play World of Warcraft, and recently have gotten re-addicted to Civilization IV.

Projects