A Summary of Me

This is a brief summary of my professional career. This is not my resume.

I was born in Northern California, near the coast. I grew up in Mendocino and Sonoma counties. I graduated from Sonoma State University in 1984 with a B.S. degree in Physics.

I joined the US Navy in November 1984 and was commissioned an Ensign in March 1985. I served aboard the USS Marvin Shields (FF-1066) and with the 1st Marine Division General Staff (HQ BN / HQ Regiment 1st Marine Division).

After I left the Navy, I worked in environmental and agricultural testing laboratories for several years. I worked as a bench analyst, a sample custodian, Health / Safety Officer and eventually became the manager of a small agricultural laboratory.

During this period, I was programming (mostly in C/C++) as a hobby. Then in March 2002, I got my first full-time programming job with Yosemite Technologies (later absorbed by Barracuda Networks). It was at YT, that I first became familiar with .NET and the C# (prounounced “See Sharp”) programming language. I also started working in the area of e-Commerce.

After several years of working as a contracter, for web development firms such as Guidance Solutions, and various other companies, I eventually landed a contract that placed me working for the County of Sacramento.

After a few months there, I attended a meet-n-greet with the County CIO. He mentioned signing up for the employment newsletter to be aware of opportunities to transition to a permanent position with Sacramento County. I was living in Placer County (a few miles east of Sacramento) so I signed up for their jobs newletter as well.

Lo and behold, I landed a job with Placer County working on what was called the “Web Team.” At that time, our team was responsible for a website built on Sitecore CMS. It was here that I was first introduced to Sharepoint in a real way. We have since transitioned our website to Civic Plus CMS as SaaS solution. So now I don’t do any low level web work anymore.

Instead, I spend most days administering the Civic Plus system, and maintaining a web application build on the K2 forms/workflow system. We have also started our transition from K2 to SimpliGov, another forms/workflow system that is entirely web-based. In response to the pandemic, my employer is moving many paper processes to the web. As a result, my team is working hard to keep up with the demand.

I do maintain several websites (including this one) that are based on WordPress. This keeps me involved with web technology. But at a much more superficial level. The jury is out on this.