[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="247" caption="Sidney and me--I&#39;m the one on the couch, being directed by the one on the floor."]<img class="  " title="Sidney and Mike." src="http://www.biggles2k.com/images/me_with_sidney.jpg" alt="Sidney and Mike--Mike is on the couch." width="247" height="191" />[/caption]
<h2><a id="theBasics" name="theBasics">The Basics</a></h2>
I am of species <em>geek</em>, specifically of genus <em>Computer</em>.  Although no person, not even yours truly, can completely fit into a single stereotype, should you wish to form an overall vision of my persona, then the above description, courtesy of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_nomenclature">binomial nomenclature</a>, suits me best. More to the point, I like geeky things, things like computers, technology, gadgets, programming, books, science, Star Wars, Star Trek, video games, board games, Dungeons and Dragons--you know, that kind of stuff. I also like dogs. People can be nice, too. (Speaking of which, I am often told I am of species <em>guy</em> of genus <em>Nice</em>. You can be the judge.)
<h2><a id="profExp" name="profExp">Professional Experience</a></h2>
<blockquote>"The brain is a wonderful organ.  It starts working the  moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get into  the office."  <strong>~Robert Frost</strong></blockquote>
I've been in the field of web application development and management for nearly a dozen years. If you count the time I spent hacking away at web sites while I was supposed to be finishing a Ph.D. in neuroscience... Well, then add a few more years to the tally. I am most familiar with the <a title="LAMP" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_%28software_bundle%29" target="_blank">LAMP</a> environment, particularly in writing programming prose with <a title="Perl - A beautiful language" href="http://www.perl.org/" target="_blank">Perl</a> and <a title="PHP - The other Perl" href="http://www.php.net/" target="_blank">PHP</a>, complemented by HTML, CSS, and Javascript on the front end, and either <a title="MySQL - Been there since the beginning" href="http://www.mysql.com/" target="_blank">MySQL</a> or <a title="Oracle - The Other MySQL" href="http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/index.html" target="_blank">Oracle</a> databases (or sometimes, both) on the back end. Despite my preference for the (mostly) open-source world, I have also dabbled in Microsoft's realm, at one time coding <a title="ASP" href="http://www.asp.net/" target="_blank">ASP</a> applications that utilized <a title="Microsoft SQL Server" href="http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/" target="_blank">Microsoft SQL Server</a>.
<h3>Managerial</h3>
<img class="alignright" style="border: 1px solid black;" title="We have met the enemy and he is us." src="http://www.biggles2k.com/images/blog/about/ph_boss.gif" alt="Our favorite boss, from Dilbert." width="77" height="77" />Lo! I have seen the enemy and he is me. I never thought it would happen, but three years ago I stepped into the field of management... voluntarily. I oversee a team of six web developers at <a title="Harvard University" href="http://www.harvard.edu" target="_blank">Harvard University</a>, a small-town bastion of academe, widely known through its mention in <a title="The Da Vinci Code" href="http://www.danbrown.com/#/davinciCode" target="_blank">Dan Brown novels</a> and the TV show, <a title="Fringe" href="http://www.fox.com/fringe/" target="_blank">Fringe</a>. Our award-winning team is part of the <a title="ATG" href="http://atg.fas.harvard.edu" target="_blank">Academic Technology Group</a>, and we oversee dozens of online applications, including course evaluations,  the course planner, a suite of instructional tools, a plethora of databases, and the University's portal. Being academia, our technological environment is varied and vast, ranging from LAMP to Java to Microsoft ASP. We even have some <a title="Apache Cocoon - XML on steroids" href="http://cocoon.apache.org/" target="_blank">Cocoon</a> servers running.

I must admit that I'm very happy in my position, and that's primarily due to the people I manage: A great group  who are smart, creative, cooperative, humorous, and satisfied with their work environment. I'm very fortunate to be leading them and hopefully, they feel the same way about leading me.
<h3>Web Development and Administration</h3>
Prior to my role in management, I spent eight years as a professional software developer for Harvard, designing, implementing, and more often than not, maintaining legacy web applications. I focused primarily on instructional software used by faculty, staff, and students in their course web sites. For each application that I wrote, I was there from start to finish, often writing up the requirements, designing the underlying architecture and data models, then bringing the whole thing to life with well-documented and modular code. I was also part of the committee that helped designed the University's proprietary course platform.

In addition to the coding, I also assisted in maintaining the application servers themselves (good ol' <a title="Apache" href="http://www.apache.org" target="_blank">Apache</a>!) configuring them when necessary. Indeed, prior to my stint at Harvard, I held the title of webmaster at a now defunct company, called Xchange, overseeing and developing within a <a title="Microsoft ISS" href="http://www.iis.net/" target="_blank">Microsoft ISS</a> environment. And prior to that, I was the webmaster for the Departments of <a title="Department of Mathematics, Purdue University" href="http://www.math.purdue.edu/" target="_blank">Mathematics</a> and <a title="Department of Statistics, Purdue University" href="http://statistics.purdue.edu" target="_blank">Statistics</a> at Purdue University.

Webmaster... a title I truly miss, both for its grandiose and the necessity to be a jack-of-all-trades. As a webmaster, I was not only administering the servers, but designing web pages, coding applications, maintaining databases, and generally just having a damn good time. Ah, days of youth, how we miss ye!
<h3>Game Design and Development</h3>
We all have hobbies, and I dabble in game development when I get a chance. Indeed, I spent five years co-producing <a title="Ultima V: Lazarus" href="http://www.u5lazarus.com/" target="_blank">Ultima V: Lazarus</a>, a remake of a classic role-playing game that rivaled its commercial counterparts in scale and complexity. I helped lead a international team of programmers, level designers, writers,  artists, musicians, and general enthusiasts in a quest to retell <a title="Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_V:_Warriors_of_Destiny" target="_blank">Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny</a> as a modification of the <a title="Dungeon Siege" href="http://www.microsoft.com/games/dungeonsiege/" target="_blank">Dungeon Siege</a> engine. My main contributions were developing the back story, implementing the skills and healing algorithms, and designing and developing the NPC conversation engine, one of the pillars of the game. Not to boast, but to this day, I'm amazed at how much work went into building that game, and how well we did it.

That was not my first telling of an Ultima tale. I'm responsible for one of the first adventure games written in dynamic HTML, back when the acronym DHTML was as hot a buzzword as HTML5 is nowadays. <a href="http://www.biggles2k.com/darkcore/" target="_blank">Ultima: The Dark Core</a> was an experiment in JavaScript, a new, shiny...
<h3>Teaching</h3>
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