I was working on my profile for my Kick-Starter Project (Fractal Walls), and was somewhat dissapointed that the 'about me' section only accepted 300 characters (I should have read the small-print before drafting such a detailed explanation). In any event, I did manage to summarize myself in the recommended 300 characters, but I didn't want to lose this interesting write-up. Also, those researching the project or myself might find the additional information insightful. Also, I just recently updated my Profile On LinkedIn
TRace ON - paradigm lock
I was about 13 when Disney released the classic Tron. I remember at the time I had a TRS-80, my first computer. I had not really learned to program, per-se, though I did know how to load, edit and save programs, peek and poke memory, create image sprites that displayed and moved on the screen, make some sounds, simple logic loops, control input and even basic logic flow such as if/then/else and goto.The TRS-80 programs were saved on regular cassette tapes and executed in an interpreter environment (Basic 8, as I recall). Suffice it to say that I had learned the fundamentals of programming, though I was very much a novice, and learned largely by trial and error.
So I had just finished watching Tron and absolutely loved the movie. Naturally, when I get home, the first thing I do is start up my computer. The computer warms up and the monitor flickers to life and the command prompt appears. I type 'TRON' and press enter.
Little did I know that TRON meant 'TRace ON'. This was the first time that I had seen the 'registers' and memory, which dumped to the screen. I was literally blown back in my chair and the blood went rushing to my head. For a minute I just sat transfixed, wondering if I had found some secret backdoor into the computer world, like Flynn had.
Anxiously, I insert my favorite game cassette and load the program, unsure of what else to do, I typed in 'run'. To my frenzied (at this point) delight and surprise, I was able to single-step through the program, see the registers and even see memory at run-time, something I had never even conceived possible (the 'users-manuals' that came with the computers mentioned NOTHING about this voodoo!).
Needless to say, at that point there was no going back and I was hopelessly obsessed with programming computers to this day. BTW: It eventually occurred to me that TROFF would help me turn tracing off.
Here I am, 28 years later, having worked the past 23+ years professionally at various levels of development, architecture and executive roles within both Enterprise and start-up organizations. I specialize in web 2.0, mobile and social technologies, analytics, virtual currencies, collaborative monetization and production, data warehousing (ETL, CUBES, Hadoop, Big Data, etc), biometrics security and user privacy. I love to architect and program, especially on modern cloud platforms. Although I have a long history in the Enterprise, I also have a long history as a serial entrepreneur, having been involved in several start-ups.
My favorite blend of technologies includes GAE, AWS, Azure, NoSQL, Graph Databases, ElasticSearch, HTML5/CSS, AJAX, JSON, WebGL, JavaScript, Python, C#, Node.js, OAuth and Open Source.
