I graduated from Computer Systems Technology at SIAST Kelsey Campus in 2008. This 2-year course concentrates on hands-on, collaborative projects as opposed to being heavily theory based like many university computer science programs. I gained experience with many different programming languages such as Java, C#, and C++. CST also included classes which exposed me to various DB engines such as Oracle, MS SqlServer, and mySQL. It was also the first place I learned about eXtreme Programming (XP) practices. My favorite part was getting to work through full projects as part of a team who was responsible for the entire life-cycle including development, acceptance testing, delivery, deployment, and maintenance.

I am now a Software Developer on an Agile Scrum team at Point2 Technologies. We practice XP techniques such as pair-programming, TDD, continuous integration, and clean code. My experience here so far has made me into a very effective Java (JVM) developer and I like utilizing tools and frameworks such as Maven-2, Hibernate, Spring, JUnit, Mockito, and pretty much anythign from Apache. The project my previous team and I just finished let us play with some new, *shiny* things such as OSGi, Camel, Jython, and MongoDB. I am currently on a new team which is very heavy on the DOT.NET stack but we also get oppurtunities to use Python and Django. We are currently developing a service-oriented, domain-driven, MVC 3 web application and I am loving the new challenges!