I live in the Twin Cities, MN. I'm employed as a software developer at a company in St. Paul, MN.

In a past life, I spent four years as a software developer at Wilson Learning Corporation maintaining and developing new software systems to support their soft-skills assessment "products" such as 360-degree assessments for various business capabilities and competencies. The software systems were responsible for survey data collection (including OCR and Internet-based surveys), back-office "scoring" of the data to produce metrics, and production of high-quality color reports for use by those being assessed and their employers.

Prior to that, I introduced myself to the software industry proper as a developer at West Group. I worked on systems that collect documents such as legal opinions from courts around the country and route them through the various preprocessing phases to extract meta-data from them and format them so that they can be published and indexed in the Westlaw database.

Earlier, I started to pursue a Chemistry Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, where I confirmed my hunches that I didn't really like Chemistry (one of my majors from college) but rather would work in software. Software had been one of my interests since I was a wee little lad of about about ten years. I managed to get myself into a research group that was doing theoretical chemistry work involving software-based prediction of molecular structures in gas and solution using quantum mechanics. Working with the chemistry software for about a year helped affirm that my software skills were good enough for me to make a good living in the software industry, and in the midst of a particularly heady and frustrating quantum mechanics course near the end of my second year, I dropped out of the program and found my job at West.