I’m currently employed by EBL Engineers, LLC, based in Parkville, MD.  They’re a small business focused on providing mechanical, electrical, and fire protection engineering services, with many contracts for the federal government.  My employment is tied in with their contract to the National Institutes of Health.  We support the Office of Research Facility‘s efforts to ensure the Clinical Center Complex (Building 10) meets Joint Commission standards.  I do database design and software development for front-ends to manage the data necessary to ensure our continued success.

Our development environment has evolved over the years.  When I arrived, we used Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to store the bulk of our data.  Eventually we moved to Perl/Tk to serve as a front-end to the data, and then moved to MySQL to serve as the back-end.  After discovering wxPerl, development went in that direction for many years, until rakaur came on board, and our world switched to wxRuby initially, but landed on Ruby on Rails.  Also around this time, we switched much of the data handling to PostgreSQL.

Before all that, I studied music at the Baltimore School for the Arts and the Peabody Conservatory of Music.  I almost finished a minor in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, which is the parent university to Peabody, but was two classes shy; their schedules conflicted with courses in my major.  The music came from my harp, which isn’t really mine but my mother lets me pretend that it is.

I live in Baltimore with my partner of five years – yes, he’s a guy too and that means I’m gay, though I think that should be a minor detail of my life and not the centerpoint of it.  I’m recently a homeowner, and dealing with all the headaches that entails.  I’m a liberal, and though registered as a Democrat, I find myself pushed further and further outside their desires for the country.

Anything else you want to know, feel free to ask.