Who am I?
I am a builder: I’ve built everything from bicycles to tiki bars to software applications. The way I see it, there are three kinds of people in the world: builders, maintainers, and destroyers. I’ve always known which of the three I want to be, and this web site is my attempt to add back to the collective knowledge of humanity.
I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Engineering from UC Davis, but the tinkering and building started long before that. Once I realized that I could build anything I can dream (given enough time),
Professionally, I am a consultant in the healthcare and mobile software industry. I was a software developer for a small California startup, Accelere Inc, for five years. We created an application for accelerating clinical trial recruitment by aggregating hospital data and providing users online tools for working with that data. Thanks to the small size of the development team my experience spanned across all three tiers, from PL/SQL & database development to creating “Web 2.0″ front ends to the unusual solution of a workflow engine for the middle tier. I pushed technologies such as XML and XForms where possible. In my last year I headed development and got to tell people what to do. I drove our documentation efforts and created and conducted presentations about how we’ve leveraged new technologies and open source to create our application. I’ve also demoed all sorts of ideas to clients and customers. Woohoo!
My thoroughness with documentation, adherence to programming best practices, and pragmatic approach to making stuff work came in handy when I started consulting. I’ve found myself coming in to clean up and document messy projects and also tackle the deep rooted problems most people push aside.
I maintain petersnotes.blogspot.com to keep track of all those pesky open source gotchas that afflict the modern developer.
I devote myself to music, writing, traveling, and a motley assortment of backyard projects that are detailed here.
In previous lives, I played hockey six days a week, drove a Zamboni, earned an engineering degree from UC Davis, filmed a few short movies, traveled extensively, and wrote more short stories and blog entries than I can count.