Professional Interests

I am trained as a physical scientist, and I apply the problem solving techniques of science to the task of programming. Most of my programming skills are self-taught - I have taught myself Perl, Java, HTML, C, IDL, VB, and some SQL. I have used these tools to create CGI scripts for server-side processing and Java applets for user interfaces to complex Web applications. I have reached the point where learning a new language is merely an exercise in learning the syntax.

I have three years of experience working with Unix platforms - specifically IRIX, Solaris, and Linux. The similarities have outweighed the differences, and switching from one to another is now nearly seamless.

I have valuable experience dealing with large data sets - specifically, those resulting from satellite and aircraft remote sening. In order to deal with one particularly large data set (on the order of 13 gigabytes), I designed a custom database format and wrote routines to access records in the database files.