Yes, that is me helping 2 class mates in this posed picture for some high school publication from the year of plaid. That teletype machine was my first computer interaction. You would key in your BASIC program in what was essentially an electric typewriter. There was nowhere to save your program, so once you were done it could be 'written' to paper tape. The next day, you could load from the paper tape. There were some Star Trek freaks that would spend an hour or more loading these huge rolls of paper tape just to place Star Trek 'on a printer'. Times has changed.

Out of college and unemployed my good friend's Dad asked if I could come to his insurance and financial planning office "for a couple of weeks", to figure out what to do with their new IBM PC provided by the home office. This is me in the only office I would ever have. It was on the 20th floor of the Chrysler Building in midtown, what a great and unexpected experience. By the time of this photo, other companies were in the PC buisness (that's an AT&T if you can imagine) and the 1st genration HP LaserJet printer was out. Also, its not legible in the photo, but that mug actually says "To Err is Human. To really screw up requires a Computer". A sign of the times. Four years later I would leave for DC to join Marroitt International.

After 4 years of programming on PCs and such, I still had the urget to be a mainframe programmer. At Marriott I would eventually get the opportunity to work on their in house payroll system. Prior to that the back office HR system (that integration to payroll) was my primary focus. Here, the entire team of techies and road warriors that did property installations visit the data center, where I got an up close view of the mainframe hardware. I couldn't have been more excited. The work on the payroll system was short lived, and my mainframe fascination finally evaporated and PeopleSoft entered my life.

Recruited back to Marriott after a dull year of doing IVR work (Interactive Voice Recognition) I was charged with developing the PeopleSoft to Marriott payroll system integration (a 2-way process). There I was, no PeopleSoft experience, no real client server experience called on to write the most complicated integration of the HR system. There had been integrations from the back office HR systems, but they essentially mimicked how the payroll system worked with their 80 column punched card record layouts and custom data structures. Our intial design was shared with the accounting department that oversaw payroll and they came back with a long list of concerns. In meeting with them, I finally just asked what their main concern was about this, to which they replied "we just don't think you can do it". Well, I've never been so motivated in my life and that integration was delivered as promised. Wasn't perfect from the get-go, but it was more than capable.

Marriott would out-source their HR and Benefit operations and that included support of PeopleSoft. I suddenly had no real role with the system, and I left for Booz Allen. I joined them as they were nearing the end of an upgrade. It was a real eye-opening experience, and I soon found that I had only scratched the surface of PeopleSoft development. No longer was SQR my main development platform, I soon became entrenched with App Engine programs and the sophisticated means of data exchange with APIs. Briming with confidence, I set out to be an independent contractor, but I figured I should get some federal government experience first. I joined the USDA as in a sub-contractor role. I suppose the main really didn't want a sub-contractor and they ignored me for several months. I spent most of the time on YouTube learning HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript. When they finally built up trust, I started to get samll efforts, but these generally dragged on and on. I found the pace of work extremenly frustrating as I don't like sitting around. Booz Allen asked if I would come back, and I did. This would be the second time a company had me back.

My return to Booz Allen was to be focused on the PeopleSoft Portal, which I welcomed as an opportunit to learn more web development. But there really wasn't much desire by the business owners to really utilize the portal, and I was back doing HR app support, mainly with performance management. When use of Taleo expanding, I think would do Taleo integrations. Soon after, the move to Workday occurred and it was a whole new world. My primary conversion activity was pulling half a million candidate from Taleo for import to Workday along with the support requisitions and such. Once the data was out of Taleo, and massaging and formatting was performed with Python scripts. Under the watchful eye of our integration partner, our integration development was limited to EIBs. It wasn't until they rolled off did we get full exposure to all facets of integration developemnt. With them out of the way, I finally got to sink my teeth into Studio development. At first it was supporting existing integrations, but soon I was developing my own and was the primary support resource. It's a love hate relationship. At times all the mouse work to do Studio is tiring and I long for my text editor where I develop desktop utilites to assist with data conversion and validation processes. Coding is what I do.

One of my favorite mottos: "The key to understanding complex things, is to know what NOT to look at."