I was born in North Dakota where I spent my childhood exploring the badlands. In college I majored in Archaeology and Classical Languages (Latin and Greek). During my summers, I was able to work as an archaeologist in North Dakota and Michigan after attending fields schools in Fargo and Greece. I continued my Archaeological education by attending graduate school at the University of Oregon where I studied Geoarchaeology and excavated a site on the Alaska Peninsula that led to my Master’s Thesis entitled “The Geoarchaeology of Nak-8”.

After graduating with my Master’s degree, I worked briefly as a contract archaeologist in Washington State before accepting a GIS Job at Pierce County Washington. I spent a year automating spatial anlysis using Avenue and AML before moving on to GeoSpatial Web Development. I spent 15 years working for Pierce County GIS as a GeoSpatial web and mobile developer before I moved to the Software Development division where I manage a small team of software engineers. At Pierce County, I also run a software development internship program that has taken 30 university students and taught them modern software development.

My interest in geospatial open source began when my manager sent me to the 2007 FOSS4G conference in Victoria. Since then, I regularly attend CUGOS in Seattle and have attended a few subseqent FOSS4G conferences (2011, 2014, and 2015).

I primarily develop in Java but I also have years of experience in Groovy, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I have also used Python, C, and C++.