I’m currently employed by Kelly Services, as part of their Kelly Government Solutions branch. I’m contracted through Kelly Services to provide support services to the National Institute on Aging‘s Intramural Research Program. Generally this means coding applications to help scientists manage and catalogue their data. I also provide general support to other members of my team as needed, including troubleshooting database issues, operating system problems, and whatever programming problems we’re faced with.

Before I started with Kelly Services, I spent many years working on a similar contract at the main Bethesda campus of the National Institutes of Health. I worked for EBL Engineers, LLC, a small business focused on providing mechanical, electrical, and fire protection engineering services, with many contracts for the federal government. They have been based for many years in Parkville, MD. My work for EBL and NIH was to assist the Office of Research Facility‘s efforts to ensure the Clinical Center Complex (Building 10) meets Joint Commission standards. This included web site design, but mostly database management and general office software support.

I’ve developed in many programming languages over the years. While at school, I took classes in C, C++ and Java, and wrote Perl and PHP for my own personal projects. During the course of my work at EBL Engineers, I started off fixing up existing Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access datasets which had been used in the transition off paper records. Eventually, I led a switch to Perl/Tk for the interface, and quickly after, to MySQL as the datastore. Eventually I switched the GUI library over to wxPerl. This development continued for a number of years.

Some time after, rakaur joined our office, and rapidly we switched to WxRuby as he took over more programming duties, and then to Ruby on Rails as we moved to a web-based front-end, and eventually Padrino. As I focused more on database work and spent less time on programming, we switched to PostgreSQL to take advantage of the many additional features it provided.

After joining the NIA, much of my work has switched back to Perl and PHP, though there are still many projects in various languages, and with large volumes of data stored across many databases. I also assist with managing Puppet deployments of the various servers used to house, serve, and analyze the scientific data collected by the institute.

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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 technically mine but my mother lets me pretend that it is.

I live in Baltimore, MD with my fiancé. I study Tai Chi at The Living Well in Charles Village, and play the harp whenever I can. English is my native language, but I could probably do a passable imitation of French, and with some practice I might be able to once again read and write Devanagari script, if not read actual Hindi.

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