We All Start Somewhere

It has been a while since I maintained any sort of professional blog. I think the last real content I added anywhere was to my classified writings for the government, and for the last 6 months of that, most of the writing was product announcements - very little actual reflection. Today, I start again. I'm motivated to do this because I think it will help me to focus my professional development. Ironically, that thought is hitting home because of reading "How I Made My First Million In Poker", a book on how to progress as a professional poker player. It's an easy read though, with concepts that largely apply to a self-driven professional in any area.

Sometimes I think I'm a great programmer. Other times, I think I'm one of the worst. Most of the time, I tend to figure that having thoughts on both sides of the coin probably means I'm well above average. But I want this blog to help improve, if only through self-reflection.

So that's why I'm here. Now let's cover a bit about my back story. I'll fight my tendency to ramble and do my best to keep this snappy.

We'll start with where I've been: After a pre-college gig doing db-driven web development in classic ASP, I earned a BS and MS in Computer Science through the University of Tulsa. That was paid for by a government scholarship that tied me in to a position with the National Security Agency.

I can talk a bit about my first and last jobs with the NSA, but probably can't answer many questions. I started off working outside the NSA, doing work for a law enforcement agency. Since that work wasn't an NSA thing, I can share. In the span of 9 months, I created a half-dozen programs for detecting and extracting hidden data encoded by various stegonography tools. I rewrote a tool they had for scanning criminal computers resulting in new ways to find evidence while simultaneously improving scanning speeds by an order of magnitude. And I analyzed/tested a distributed password-cracking program to compare methods and results against industry standard tools.

I concluded my time with NSA developing an enterprise-wide collaborative Q&A tool which supported thousands of users. In short, I spent 18-months creating a PHP/MySQL-driven copy of StackOverflow by hand, with results that had many users convinced we had obtained a customized version from the StackOverflow developers.

Outside of NSA, I started a side-business based on my passion for online poker. I created Grinderschool.com, a video training site for providing poker strategy with a focus on low stakes players. I am proud of what the site has grown into, but have some regrets that over the years, most of the development for the site was fast-paced hack-it-out rather than professional quality. That is starting to change, but since it remains a side project, that process is a slow one.

After leaving the NSA six months ago, I joined Rubicite Interactive as a partner in the business. Our main thrust is web development for clients. I developed a site (which has yet to launch) for quickly customizing high-end frames - the kind a doctor would buy to show off his achievements. Currently I am working on a site for managing rental properties. The work with Rubicite is all on the ASP.NET stack, which is a different programming methodology than I've followed in the past. That's where a lot of hangups come from for me currently, and will likely be the subject of a lot of my posts here.