Game, Graphics and Web Developer

Developer Timeline

Here is my developer timeline thus far. For a more formal write up see my Resume.

Developer Timeline

First Program (LOGO)
First Program (LOGO)

So sometime during my tenure at Maine-Memorial Elementary School I remember using LOGO to program a greeting for my parents on Back To School night.  I was very proud of it, but something went a bit wrong for some reason the then end product was something like the attached image.  I…Read More

First Family PC
First Family PC

I remember distinctly going to Radio Shack on a cold day to pick out our first computer. It was a Tandy with a dot matrix printer and 3.5 inch disk drive, and if I remember correctly it had 256K RAM. It was very exciting for me though and instantly a…Read More

First Application (BASIC)
First Application (BASIC)

Upon visiting my friend who had windows 3 installed, there was an interesting new solitaire game called Tri-Peaks. Instantly addicted I wanted to play it on my old Tandy, but alas, the Tandy was still running just DOS. Somewhere along the way I had discovered BASIC so I took it…Read More

First Programming Class (Turbo Pascal)
turbo pascal

So somewhere in High School I remember having a computer class where we were taught basic programming in TurboPascal. Having perfected (in my mind) my programming skills during the Tri-Peak project I sailed through the exercises rather quickly and had a bunch of extra time during class. One day, after…Read More

Undergraduate in Mathmatics at Penn
Undergraduate in Mathmatics at Penn

So in September 1993 I packed my bags and headed off to the City of Brotherly Love to attend the University of Pennsylvania. In those days I aspired to be a high school math teacher and so consequently spent most of my time studying Math and various other liberal artsy…Read More

First Real Job (Microsoft Access/ VBA)
Microsoft Access 2000 logo

So I got my first real job in 1999 working at Penn’s School of Medicine in the Office of Faculty Affairs. My predecessor did a whole bunch of reports using Excel that had to be manually refreshed every month. That was pretty tedious so I began converting all the reports…Read More

First Web Application (PHP/Oracle)
php elephant logo

We pretty quickly outgrew the Microsoft Access database and needed a better way to disseminate the information to numerous different parties. At this point I joined the programming group and created my first web application using PHP and Oracle: the Faculty Affairs Database System [FADS]. Although this was my first…Read More

First Online Games (Java Applets)
java icon

In honor of the birth of my first two kids I dipped my toe into the now defunct world of Java applets. They were pretty simple games based upon sliding puzzles and the Rush Hour puzzle game, but fun to have my first distributed game.

First Interactive Online Game – Lord of the Rings Risk
Lord of the rings risk

At a certain point in my career I ended up doing a lot more management and institutional reporting and a lot less programming. In order to get my programming fix and also the achieve the trifecta of nerdiness (Lord of the Rings + Board Games + Programming) I made an…Read More