My handsome mug.
I have finally made a choice; the bold allocation of time and a proper venue for writing my final testament to myself on the Internet. I am not a person with a large ego, in fact, the less I have to write about myself the better I seem to feel. But if I am going to sit in a chair for hours at a time each week and write to an audience from around the world, I see fit to have a little something-something about myself on this pitiful attempt of a website. I have decided that it does not have to be long, nor very descriptive, but it has to be just enough to satisfy the meager hungry of you, Joe reader, so let me know if there is anything else I need to add.
What best explains the gibberish, sometimes uncomprehensive rantings, that seemingly flow from my fingers so easily and clearly? It would be nice if I could explain myself with a single lengthy sentence that wraps out the complexities of my personality into a present with a little red bow. Unfortunately, I, like many other humans in this world, are sentient beings which have an everlasting desire to always continue, never stop, and wake up the next morning to do it all over again. But, hey, just like everyone else on this massive world of interconnected wires, I’m going to give it one hell of a try.
I have been living and breathing on this world for roughly twenty-four years now. Most of those days were spent living on the Jersey shore, a couple miles from the beach, hacking away at code instead of doing my daily prescribed homework. I was sucked into the world of computers at an early age and become a video game addict before I was legally able to vote in a neo-conservative asshole, the first time. More often than not I am the victim of insatiable insomnia which is the product of my mind unable to stop racing despite my body yearning slumber.
For over two years I was working with a great group of individuals attempting to change how the world visualizes information at Zinkk Inc, a northern New Jersey startup. We developed a semantic processing system called Linguist to produce realtime, computer generated associations between information to build an unbiased news story from all sources available. Unfortunately, real life caught up to many of us and we shut down January 2010. Most of my work was spent on developing the front-end web technology that would drive the would-be social news portal, but occasionally I got the chance to dive into the heart of our Java system.
While working with the boys at Zinkk I was employed as a part-time software contractor in the quantitative strategies division at Citigroup. I decided to part ways with the amazing team of individuals at Citi for bigger and better prospects. Since January 2010, I have been working as a senior software engineer in the research and development arm at Bloomberg L.P. working primarily inside the Equity OTC Derivatives team.
I received an associates degree in computer science from Ocean County College (New Jersey) and my bachelors in computer science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. While at NJIT I was involved in several extracurricular activities, but most of my time was spent working at the Vector newspaper and in my final year, as the Editor-in-Chief (Jun 2008-Jun 2009). I currently reside in Kearny, NJ contemplating life, pounding away on my phone’s virtual keyboard on Twitter, and occasionally teaching some software development at my old university to graduating seniors.
For those of you that are interested in my work you can grab a copy of my resume from my personal data store on the Internet. You can also check out my Github open source repositories for some software examples. One last thing: my apologies if any of the information above is not up-to-date, I make my best attempt to update it every couple of months, but most of the time work and school get in the way of achieving that goal.
Footnote: What you are reading can be consider the result of a little insomnia, some creative thinking, and a pissed off human male writing to a slowly waning caffeine buzz.