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.
I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Engineering from UC Davis, but the tinkering and building started long before that. At some point I realized I could build just about anything I could dream up (especially with the internet available) and I’ve gone from there.
Professionally, I am a consultant in the healthcare/pharmaceutical and mobile software industry. I was a software developer for a small SF Bay Area 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. 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. The company didn’t pan out, but it was a great experience!
My thoroughness with documentation, adherence to best practices, and pragmatic approach to making stuff work came in handy when I started consulting. I’ve had the most fun (and success) coming in to clean up messy projects, tackling the deep rooted issues no one wants to touch. My interest in left brained activities has been a great help in communicating this change to clients.
I devote myself to music, writing, traveling, and a motley assortment of backyard projects, some of which are detailed on these very pages.
I maintain petersnotes.blogspot.com to keep track of all the pesky open source gotchas that afflict the modern developer.
In previous lives, I played hockey six days a week, drove a Zamboni, earned my engineering degree from UC Davis, filmed a few short movies, and wrote more short fiction than I can remember.