My technology journey started in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio where I was born and raised.  In high school, I learned a little BASIC programming on a Radioshack TSR-80 before the Internet was a thing.

Later I was re-introduced to computers while stationed in Kaiserslautern, Germany (K-town) with the U.S. Army.  The computer was a Commodore 64. At the time my Commodore 64 was for playing games and minor Office applications using Geos OS from Berkeley Software.  However, that Geos OS really set the grounds for my future.  It did everything we are used to having on our modern systems today. (Desktop, icons to launch programs, copy/cut/paste actions, file explorer to find files, etc.)

Also while in the military, I learned a great deal about hardware from a computer science roommate, a real-life rocket scientist, who was into PC hardware in a very big way.  I was taught how IBM compatibles worked from the inside out, with the 8088 processor and 8087 co-processor. (WOW! Those were the days.)

Now fast forward 21 years later… (No need to bore you with the 18 years of the boring crap in between.)

I have extensive experience with Windows and Linux server administration, networking, and web bases application programming.  Though I am certified in PHP and have a few AWS certifications I do most of my work as an application architect specializing in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python) development.

One of my great passions is helping others learn more about technology, and growing the PHP community in South Florida. To that end, I organized the South Florida PHP Users Group (SoFloPHP) which is now around 1,100+ members. I also organized the SunshinePHP Developer Conference in Miami to bring more knowledge to the market and helping local PHP developers discover the benefits of the global PHP community.

Another way I help others is by speaking at conferences around the world about refactoring, clean application development, git, virtualized development, and many other topics. Please check out my talks page to see more.

I’m also a regular contributor to many open-source projects and enjoy working with awesome developers from around the world to tackle problems. Many of the projects I contribute to can be found on my Github profile.

In 2018 I also started Beachcasts where I create programming and tech-related videos on YouTube and live streams on Twitch.