I graduated in 1996 from the University of Western Ontario with an Honours Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. Western had a computer lab of IBM RS/6000s, where I gained much of my experience in UNIX and, more specifically, IBM's AIX operating system. Today, I work exclusively with Objective-C and the Developer Tools for Mac OS X.
In 1998, I moved beyond my technical skills in computer science and enrolled in the Richard Ivey School of Business' MBA program. In 2000, I graduated with my MBA degree and started my own company, Modeless Software, Inc. I'll talk more about my company later.
Over the years I've only had a few jobs worth mentioning. Each was a great time, and I've been lucky to work in environments with great people and great ideas. After completing my MBA, I started my own company which I will discuss at some point in the future.
I worked at Alias between October 1996 and August 1998. Alias|Wavefront is a software company responsible for some of the most innovative 3D Modeling and Animation tools. This is a company whose effors touch just about everyone's lives. Alias software helps companies like Sony, Mercedes, Apple, and many more envision the designs for new products. Other companies like Disney and Industrial Light and Magic use Alias software to bring Hollywood to life in films like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Titanic, and Terminator II. Nintendo and other gaming companies use Alias 3D software to build the elements of today's 3D games. And animators blah blah use Alias software to animate their hit show South Park. Working at Alias was a great experience, and it was as much fun as I had always dreamed.
At Alias, I worked with the R&D team to produce our flagship product Alias Studio. I was responsible for the managing the source code base and the entire build environment. The build environment integrated developer changes into the existing code base, and periodically produced an up-to-date version of Studio. Most of my tasks were system level tasks and allowed me to develop extensive knowledge of the IRIX operating system and its compilers. Managing the build environment also meant budgeting resources.
I also manaintend the code for our internal bug tracking system: an Oracle Developer/2000-based client-server application.
After my third year in the Computer Science program, I opted to take a 16-month internship at IBM's Toronto Lab, working with the team of software developers that put together DB2 for AIX, IBM's industrial-strength relational database management system. (More to come.)
During my final year at Western (1995-96), I was a teaching assistant for the third-year Computer Science course on computer architecture and assembly language. Working with another fourth-year student, we marked student assignments and help students with questions about course or assignment materials.