About Me

I'm a middle-aged guy that is passionate about technology including software development, application life-cycle management (ALM), DevOps, and the design and architecture of systems. I prefer to code within agile projects. I personally like Kanban better than SCRUM, but most companies I've worked for in the past lean toward “SCUM-but” implementations of SCRUM. I have a 42U rack enclosure in my basement with two virtualization servers running Microsoft Hyper-V in a fail-over cluster, a 12TB NAS server for personal files, a 6TB NAS server for shared storage of virtual machines utilizing 10Gb MPIO iSCSI dedicated network, a PFSense firewall server, and one 4TB “Home” Server running Server Essentials to backup all of my family laptops and workstations. I also run several VLAN networks between my various switches and wireless access point to support my primary, lab, guest, work networks…

To say I “eat, sleep, and dream” this stuff is probably not that far of a stretch…

On the “non-tech” side, I'm a married man with two wonderful daughters. I met my wife in September 1995 at the college we were both attending at the time. I've lived and worked in the Washington, DC area since 1997. When not doing “tech-things”, I enjoy spending time with family and riding my bicycle on the many bike trails around the area.

I am also always pursuing new learning opportunities. See Learning Opportunities to see the types of learning I try to do.

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I have been programming computers since 1977 and since 1996 in business environments. I develop primarily in C# now but during my career, I've programmed using Perl, PHP, Python, VB, Java, JavaScript, FORTRAN, C, C++, and a little bit of COBOL. I discovered during that time, that I really do not like programming in Perl and C++. These days when I'm not writing code in C#, I'll also write code in Python and Node.js. I develop mainly on the Windows platform but I like to program for Linux systems once in a while. I like to work in challenging work environments where I can use my skills to design and develop cost-effective solutions. I am experienced in business process analysis, work flow modeling, and software architecture design. I believe that sizing up complex issues is one of my strongest strengths. I quickly sort through the pieces, pull out the key elements, and draw up effective action plans. I am a very resourceful individual who strives to consistently meet or exceeds the goals. I work well within the “system” and can be depended upon to find creative ways to overcome obstacles. I strive to stay current with new developments in my field of expertise. More recently, I've been working more on the engineering side where I've had the opportunity to work directly with enterprise level virtualization, automation, software-defined networking, and private cloud implementations.

My wife (girlfriend at the time) actually came up with that name… When I first moved to Washington, DC, I lived in a small one bedroom apartment. Working at Marriott at the time allowed me to bring home old equipment which I would convert into “Servers”. I had a DSL line with a static IP (being an early adopter) so I ran my email and web servers at home along with my “lab” environment. At its largest, I had about 10 computers in my apartment. Since I was still living the “bachelor” life, I put all of the computers including my workstation and laptop in the dining room. Several times when she was over, she'd answer the phone and tell the caller that “He is in his corner…” Given that my computers were in fact in the corner of the room and I was running my web site at the time there, It naturally became “Julian's Corner of the Internet” which was later shorten to “Julian's Corner” which led to the domain name.