I don’t ever recall even a moment where I thought that I might be bored. There is always something interesting to investigate or even just wonder about. I always seem to have a next project in mind. For example at current writing I am working on a website / application that will allow me to see (almost) real-time analytics for Sabres games. And ever since I changed direction in my career towards AI in 2022, there is always something new to learn.
Most of my past projects involved something that I read about and thought it sounded cool to do. For example, one day I woke up and realized that I wanted …. no, needed …to be able to find out the pool temperature by asking Alexa. Solution? Solder a temperature probe to a Raspberry Pi and have it report back to a db on the web that AWS could access as an endpoint. The problem? I didn’t know much about any of those items at the time. A few weeks later I had it done.
My favorite projects are the ones where I mix my passions. For example, I am an avid movie reviewer so I thought I would make an application where I could easily pull in movie art, detail, etc into my review so as to make the time to create a movie review very short. The result is the movie review site / application IHateBadMovies.com. I just realized that I don’t have a page which shows the admin side of the site where the magic happens – I’ll get to that soon.
My career has been an interesting one. I got a job with IBM not long after college and that had me moving to Connecticut. I loved the job and the people that I worked with, but I longed to be back home. After a few years there, I did get the opportunity to move back for an even better job. I spent seventeen years of my life at that job and had so many wonderful friendships. At different times I wore different hats there – from developer to team lead to architect. But more importantly, I was “dad” to so many there. And I loved it. When the pandemic hit, that all came to an end when the company decided to get out of custom software development. To be honest, it was a blessing in disguise. For years I knew that I was skating on thin ice. I was an expert at an IBM technology that was dying. I had been ramping up in other technologies but that was difficult given the time commitments of the job and raising a young family. The pandemic provided me an opportunity to reinvent myself in 2020 in React and SharePoint / Azure (which is a sprawling environment). As exhausting as that was at times, I decided to do it again in late 2022 when I had my heart set on AI / Data Intelligence / Machine Learning.
My interests are not limited to making things that make my wife shake her head or reviewing movies (although she did shake her head when I bought a motorcycle in 2022). I am an avid fitness enthusiast and I either jog or do a p90x workout nearly every day. I can still play a mean center field (update: the team disbanded, probably because I was still considered to be “the young guy”). Reading material includes learning about people that think in really unique ways and just about anything historical. My favorite thing in the world is being a father and nothing will top that. I enjoy laughing and making other people laugh – there was a time when I thought I could have a career doing that. Fortunately I didn’t quite my day job :-). Being a good person is a must and I live every day trying to make the world a better place.
