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Hello, World!

This is my new blog! This is my first foray into writing about technology - of course I've written my share of documentation, specifications and proposals, but this is different: this blog is completely open-ended. I'm not constrained by what a client wants or the marketing team likes. So...to start with, I'm going to talk a little about myself.

I grew up near Albany, NY and studied at Cornell University where I graduated with majors in Mathematics, Computer Science and Philosophy. Since graduating in 2005, I have had a variety of software-related jobs. My job titles have included Systems Analyst, Project Manager, Software Developer, Development Manager and Lead Engineer. I have been working in the New York City metro area since early 2010, and recently moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Working in software technology is great in NYC - it's one of the top places in the US for technology jobs and I find the urban lifestyle fits my tastes very well.

Most of my engineering experience is in Java development, and in the open-source ecosystem that supports Java development. Some of the tools I like to work with include Solr/Lucene, Spring, Hadoop, Maven, Tomcat, Jetty, Jenkins, Nginx, MySQL and Cassandra. While less glamorous, I frequently use Google Gson and Apache HttpClient. I also have a working knowledge of JSTL, Velocity, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I'm not a very good UX designer, but I keep working on it.

I have long been fascinated by distributed systems, especially the impact of network partition on distributed computing. Some of my other interests include responsive/mobile web design, native Android development, data visualization, large scale data analysis, real-time information processing, software build systems and API's. Modular and layered designs are a cornerstone of my software design style. Software tends to come apart at the interfaces, so it's important to focus on them.

In conclusion I want to introduce a companion application to this blog. I'm launching a demo application that reports status information and news related to mass transit in the New York City metro area. I expect the techniques and challenges involved will help me find good topics to post about on the blog. It's pretty basic at the moment.

Thanks for joining me on this writing journey. I'm not sure where this will take me, but that's part of the appeal. Happy reading!

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