To get the personal stuff out of the way, I have been married for 12 years to my high school sweetheart and we have 3 wonderful children. Our entire family is addicted to all new electronics and we all love technology.

I wrote my first program when I was about 6 or 7 years old on an ATARI 800 XL. It was a BASIC program. All I remember is a keyboard, a cartridge, and a television. I typed in my program and it made different things pop up on the screen. I fell in love with development from that moment. I continued to cultivate that love through the years. I took a Turbo Pascal class when I was only in the 8th grade and my parents kept me in various science and technology programs throughout high school. The study of computers and computer science was a natural fit for me as I embarked on my journey as an engineering student at Lehigh University.

I graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in Computer Engineering. My first job out of college was with Accenture. I worked for them for about a year and a half before transferring to a company they formed with Microsoft called Avanade. It was with Avanade that my software development career really began. I worked on a variety of development projects beginning with ASP, VB, and C++ before moving to the .Net world. The majority of my assignments were in the financial industry, however, I also did short stints in insurance, retail, and government. With each completed project, I gathered more and more skills and continued my love affair with development. I embraced any challenge placed in front of me. I enjoyed the critical thinking involved in initial analysis, the creativity in design, and the problem solving techniques used throughout the development process. I learned that it wasn’t sufficient enough to make projects work, but maintainability, understanding client needs, and time to market were all just as important.

I loved being a consultant. The traveling, continuously switching projects, learning new things, and interacting with new people were all attractive. I worked as a consultant for 8 years, earning a Master’s Degree in Computer Information Systems from the University of Phoenix during that time. Although I loved life as a consultant, my family life suffered. The company I worked for was committed to work-life balance, but as my family expanded, it became more and more difficult to achieve that balance. I decided to move to a more stable position that did not require any travel in order to spend more time with my children. I took a position with Susquehanna International Group which is where I am currently employed.

I began at SIG as a software engineer. Within one year, I moved to Team Lead of the Books and Record Systems team where I led a cross functional team of developers, testers, and business analyst in support of services that provided trading data to middle and back office systems. As the time passed by, I began to spend less and less time in the development environment and more and more time in meetings, project management, stakeholder support, people management, and product management. As a person who always loved getting up and going to work each day, it was difficult to realize that I was slowly losing that joy. At first, I had no idea what the issue was, but over time and some deep internal reflection, I began to recognize that it was lack of software development that was driving this unhappiness. It was a difficult decision for me to decide that the team lead position was not for me. Despite conversations with my manager to the contrary, I was convinced that a move to software engineer was a move backwards. However, I knew that I needed to make the move in order to be successful. I learned from my father early on that loving your job is extremely important, regardless of money or position and if you loved what you did, success would follow. With that in mind, I stepped back from the team lead position and took a developer role on the same team. Due to my knowledge of the team and the products, I still lead various projects and serve as a mentor for the team. However, I am able to actually participate in the development activities. I quickly realized that a step away from team lead was not a step backwards.

I am now set to go through a different career progression and I’m tremendously excited about my new role. Each day I am honing my skills and learning new things. I decided to write this blog as an outlet to share the things I learn as well as a way to document my findings for my own use. Hopefully others will find useful information in my writings.