After my first day at MojoTech I wanted to introduce myself to the greater MojoTech community and share my initial reflections about the new environment.
By way of introduction, I am a Rhode Islander for the last eight years but have lived and worked in the Boston, Washington, San Francisco, and New Jersey (and its adjacent suburb New York City) areas. I’m a proud father of three boys and spend a little more than a third of my life working, a little less than a third sleeping, and a third yelling “don’t climb on that.”
On the technology side, I’ve been tinkering with computers since the TRS-80 days, but have spent most of my professional career in the higher education sector at Harvard and Brown. The projects I worked on included human resource systems, identity management infrastructure, and authentication/authorization utilities. I’ve been a Ruby programmer since 2006 and a Java and PL/SQL Programmer before that. With the little free time I have, I have started to experiment with Clojure.
After my first day at MojoTech, I am struck by the tangible passion for technology and engineering, and the deliberate focus on applying that technology to projects. It seems like you can’t go to the water cooler without learning about an interesting tool, library, or user interface. The developers and designers are pretty fired up about what they are working on and Nick and Chris have set the tone that the practice of the craft of software development is centered on quality and innovation. My new suitemate, Aaron Snyder, showed me a user interface for a project he is working on and it was simply stunning. The bar is clearly set high at MojoTech and I am thrilled to be a part of the community.
—Mike McDermott