About Me

I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in the summer of 1991, with a BS in Computer and Electrical Engineering.  The remainder of 1991 was spent delivering pizzas during the day and assembling Wang computers on a production belt at night as no professional related job opportunies could be found. 

In 1992 I finally landed a real job at a company called Easel Corporation based in Burlington, MA.    Easel's primary products were 4GL tools to integrate with enterprise databases and 3270/5250 systems.  I started off in the technical support group and provided phone based support for developers who ran into programming issues with the Easel product line.  In 1993 a rival company called Enfin was bought out by Easel, which produced similar 4GL tools to the Easel product line, but was Smalltalk based.  I  transitioned from supporting Easel products to Enfin products and started to dip my fingers into training/consulting for both product lines.  Eventually I moved into core development where, rather than supporting the 4GL Easel and Enfin tools, I was modifying the underlying C/C++ code. 

I left Easel in 1994 to join a startup company called Stylus Innovation, founded by Michael Cassidy (an ex-Easelite) and based in Cambridge, MA.   The company received initial funding as a result of winning the Entrepreneurial Business Plan Competition for a bar code reader (stylus) that allowed the disabled/elderly to quickly and easily construct grocery lists by scanning entries from a catalog.  The primary product line was Visual Voice, which was a suite of C++ based ActiveX controls (OCXs back then) that provided high level APIs for interfacing with PC telephony hardware so that Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Text To Speech (TTS), Voice Recognition (VR) and Fax systems could be built.  I started off in the technical support/development/qa/documentation group since there were only 10 other people in the whole company.  It was here that I got my first exposure to, and appreciation for, Visual Basic and it's promise as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool.  After a couple of years of hard work, a company by the name of Artisoft  bought Stylus Innovation for several million dollars.  I eventually transitioned into core development fulltime and continued to help develop new ActiveX controls for new PC telephony hardware. 

I left Artisoft in 1998 to join another startup company called Groove Networks , founded by Ray Ozzie and based in Beverly, MA.  Groove has 2 main products - a robust COM based platform for developing collaborative applications, and the rich client built on top of the platform called the Transceiver.  I started off in core development and initially worked on developing critical pieces of the platform.  After a couple of years, I transitioned into the Developer Services organization who's charter was to educate and empower external developers on building applications on the platform.  I spent a couple of years there before moving to the Concept Development team where I built proof of concepts that leverage leading edge technologies in Groove and 3rd party tools/applications.  After a couple more years, I moved into the Professional Services organization as a Solution Architect where I am involved in pre/post sales technical discussions as well as the design and implementation of solutions for customers.

In April of 2005, Groove Networks was acquired by Microsoft Corp - specifically the Information Worker Group that reports to Jeff Raikes.  I continued in my role as a Solution Architect and found myself making more and more trips to Redmond, WA.  On one of those trips near the end of summer, I found out a little bit about what Ray Ozzie & his team was working on - I was intrigued.  So intrigued, that a few months later I become one of the Architects on Ray's Concept Development Team.  I am now involved in the creation of specifications and working demonstrations of emerging technologies, as well as acting as a liason with internal and external groups on how to leverage them.

I am an avid believer in the philosphy that there is no such thing as a stupid question - as long as you only ask once.

The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

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