The Bulldog is the mascot of my alma mater; Prodigal reflects how I (mis-) spent my time there.

Programming Background

I'm still a novice, for the most part, even though coding has played a significant, if small, role throughout the last 15 years of my educational and professional careers.

I started with classes in QBASIC early in high school and moved on to C++ for the AP computer science exam. I also did some summer coursework in Scheme Lisp and Perl during my high school and college years. But all this experience is too far in the past now to have much practical value. Still, now that I'm learning more modern languages, I feel the benefits of early exposure to programming concepts.

My most current skill set is in VBA, which I explored extensively throughout college in my endeavors to make MS Excel do what MS Access does before I knew what a relational database was. Since then, I've leveraged that familiarity with the Office object model to automate tasks in Excel, Word and Access in the project management jobs I worked after college, although I was never formally trained or employed as a developer.

For years, I've wanted to build my working knowledge of coding up to what has gelled into a strong conceptual understanding of the underlying principles. There are a number of applications I've been thinking about building for years, and I feel I'm at the point where the only thing standing in my way is syntax.

I'm choosing Java and JavaFX 2.0 as a starting point since many of the projects I plan on taking on would benefit from the cross-platform portability these technologies seem to offer. I also plan on becoming familiar with the LAMP stack to open the door to turning some of these projects into cottage-industry-sized tech start-ups. Finally, I'd like someday to return to C++ and even learn C, since I'm a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy, and I know these languages are the underpinning of all the other technologies I'm planning to use.