I was a coder and consultant in the automotive, defense and space industries back in the '90s. My company was fairly cutting edge for a while , doing webapps around '95. HP and Netscape and others were interested in our web tag based database queries, but developed their own products after seeing our demo. Our tech was obsoleted by javabeans, but it was fun for a while.

After that I became a wireless data engineer for a mid-tier CellCo. I ended up specing and creating the WAP deck (flip phone capable web server) and created automated reporting with Perl and Mason (for the display end).

After that, My wife and I went nuts and adopted a sibling group or 5 ranging cd 18 mos to 12yrs. I spent about 12 years as a stay-at-home dad which was hard, very hard. Chaotic and flighty are better descriptors for me than organized and neat. We survived, even thrived at times, but I ended up in a pretty serious funk. Three years ago, I started working for a parts store, more or less to see if me and the family, youngest now 17, could manage it.

Recently, I found an IT manager that was willing to take a chance on my coding abilities and I'm back in the game. Currently I'm gnashing my teeth trying to figure out beat BigCommerce's API into submission with PHP. Please be patient, I'm a little out of date, but I learn quickly!