Atmospherian's Dev Blog

I am your average technology generalist who has been learning and using various languages and platforms for over 12 years now. I started learning HTML back when i was 15 and eventually that fed my interest in other areas of programming.

Back in the mid 90s i was heavy into the local BBSing scene, and even hosted a BBS of my own. A desire to make my own BBS software inspired me to learn Pascal and C. I did manage to to get a client to connect to my software and i could transmit ANSI graphics, but afterwards my interest in the project faded as dial-up internet began to gain some traction. My first foray into web design came with an ISP called GNN. They had this page desigining program called GNN Press which i used to create a few pages in tribute to my favorite bands of the time, as i didn’t yet understand how to host pictures myself, i hotlinked photos from other sites i found, viewing the page source to get the URLs. This was also when i discovered that i could see how other pages were made and studied the HTML and learned from it. GNN was eventually bought by AOL and GNN Press became AOL Press and my sites ceased to exist.

As i learned more about C and then C++ i figured the best thing to do with my time would be to make games. I played around with djgpp and allegro and tried to make a tile-based RPG. I got as far as a simple map editor before i lost interest. I tried to port my map editor/tile engine to DirectDraw and when that failed miserably i decided that i was probably better suited to web design and focused on that for the next few years.

Eventually i got bored with making static pages and started getting interested in Java Applets and the cool things that could be created with them. Around the same time i also started looking into Flash and what cool stuff could be done there. That was Flash 4. With Java not being able to satisfy my visual cravings, Flash won the browser based interactive graphics platform war for me.

During college i worked as an intern for a non-profit web design company funded by the college. I got a lot of real-world experience there and ended up working for one of the clients exclusively.

It was at this point that i took a job at the college in the IT department as a technician. After a few years that job led to the Geek Squad. Less than a year after that i got a job for a company in NY, and that is where i am now. Part IT Manager, part Software Engineer. I mainly use C# for my work here, but i also work on my own projects during my long train commute and on weekends. These projects have exposed me to Actionscript, haXe, Ruby (and Rails), Python, J2EE, Scala, Groovy, Hibernate, jMonkeyEngine, OpenGL, Qt, wxWidgets, Silverlight, XNA, WPF, SQL Server, MySql, Sqlite, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Visual Studio, IntelliJ, NetBeans, Eclipse, VIM, Blend, and probably a few others i can’t think of right now.

I have a few projects either currently in production, or in the planning stages, the biggest so far is InterIMAP, an open-source IMAP client library written in C#. My next major project is an AS3 to Haxe translator. So my posts about it for current status.