About

Thanks for reading my blog. If you’re like me, you like to know a little bit about the person whose blog you’re reading, so I’m going to try to give you all the important stuff.

Table of Contents

• Professional
• Personal
• Why are you telling me all of that?

Professional

Perhaps the more interesting part of who I am is my professional side. I graduated in 1997 from Oklahoma Baptist University with a B.S. in Computer Information Systems (Interdisciplinary with an Emphasis in French, for what that’s worth : ). Since then, I’ve worked in a number of different industries (retail, medical records/insurance, manufacturing, and now… software) in a number of different languages (TCL, C/C++, PHP, Python, Delphi, and Java, among others). While I currently work on web applications, I’ve worked on backend systems as well as frontend (Java AWT and Delphi) user applications.

While my experience is varied, my most recent positions introduced me to and kept me involved in JavaServer Faces, the Java EE standard web application framework. First as user, then contributor through Mojarra, and now as an expert group member, I have dedicated a significant amount of my professional and personal to framework. In addition to my duties on the Expert Group (paltry as they may be in comparison to some of the bigger players in the group) and my as of late minimal involvement in the development and improvement of the reference implementation, Mojarra, I’m involved in the Mojarra Scales project, which is a set of JSF components which are mostly YUI-based, as well as FacesTester, a JUnit-based testing framework for JSF.

All of that is in my spare time. Obviously, something has to pay the bills, and that something is Sun Microsystems, for whom I work on the GlassFish Administration Console. I have been with Sun since July of 2008 as part of the GlassFish team, an engagement I hope lasts a long, long time.

In addition to all of that, I am currently the president of the Oklahoma City Java Users Group, a role I have filled since, if I recall correctly, early to mid 2007.

Personal

A professional bio is lacking, I think, without the context of a personal bio. To that end, I am married (since November 2000) to a beautiful woman. We have two sons, and one Boxer. We live in Oklahoma, where we are close to family, so we hope to stay there permanently. We find it to be a great place to live and raise a family.

On a really personal, though not private, note, I am a (conservative) Believer in and follower of Jesus Christ, and attend Quail Springs Baptist Church, where I serve as a deacon, in addition to playing electric bass in the orchestra and praise band. Politically, I am also conservative, and am currently registered as a Republican, though party loyalty takes a back seat to ideological purity and consistency, if that makes sense.

Why are you telling me all of that?

I do so for a couple of reasons. Professionally, it’s nice to know a little bit about who you’re reading to help gauge the value, accuracy, etc of the content. On a personal note, it’s important for me to be known for more than my professional work. As much as I enjoy that, it really is the least important part of who I am, from my perspective anyway.

Secondly, I want to say all of that to get it out of the way, and make this… contract with you. Having read the above, you know (or can guess) where I stand on a fair number of non-technical issues if you care. Most likely, though, you came here to read about some technical issue, or you follow me to see what I might be working on or discussing at any given moment. While my personal beliefs are very important to me, I understand that you come to this blog for technical information, and not for theological, philosophical, or political discussions. That being so, you will not see this blog say much, if anything, along those lines. I’m not ashamed of those beliefs by any means, but I have other outlets for those discussions. For the curious, you can find those here and here. This blog, though, is focused on technology and will stay that way (though you might see the occasional Christmas or Easter comments, for example). Those that just want a brief bio of who I am now have that and can continue with the technical discussions, while those interested in my ramblings on other topics now know where to find that side as well.

With that out of the way, thanks for taking the time to read my blog. I hope it’s helpful, and please note that I do read every comment and do my best to reply.

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