About Me
My name is Bryan and I was born in Grants Pass, OR in 1984. I started programming in middle school, mostly playing around with web pages, and I had a lot of fun doing it. My high school offered an introductory programming class that started with Basic and worked its way up through various other languages (VB 6, Pascal, C++) as you repeated the course. I graduated in 2002 and decided to attend St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN majoring in Math and Physics.
Throughout college I planned to attend graduate school in some form of advanced space propulsion (non-chemical rockets, e.g. the ion drive used on Deep Space 1) or astrophysics. By the beginning of my senior year I had completed my math major and only had one class left for my physics major so I decided to pick up a minor in computer science. At the same time I was trying to find graduate programs in one of my chosen areas of study and found very few programs out there and none were at schools I’d be willing to go to. Looking past graduate school the job prospects didn’t look very promising with the cutbacks in pure science and R&D going on at the time so I decided to see if I could work in industry without getting bored. I focused on finding a job that used a combination of my physics and CS skills and managed to get a position making aerodynamics models for flight simulators (real ones, not Microsoft Flightsim). I ended up graduating in 2006 from St. Olaf with a double major in Physics and Math as well as a minor in Computer Science.
My work primarily focused on making the aerodynamic and associated models for my new company’s flight simulators using a mixture of Matlab/Simulink and C++. I really enjoyed myself and liked the people I worked with but, best of all, it didn’t bore me to death. As much as I enjoyed my work, after a little over two years I decided it was time to pursue some other career options.
Remembering my favorite task at my first company – making my own interpreted language to automate the simulators – I decided to focus even more on my programming skills and less on physics or engineering. After a brief search I found my current company and took a position as a .Net Developer working on software for EMS (EMTs/Paramedics) organizations. Since my current work is focused on the .NET framework and WPF many of my posts will be focused there but I may decide to mix it up from time to time with thoughts on software delopment processes, book/development tool reviews, or other topics.
