Hello, it's nice to meet you

Well hello there inter-nets. I'm Paul, just another technology guy.

I don't usually like talking about myself, much.  But seeing as this is a new blog I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a little about myself, my relationship to technology, and my brand affinity. I think the last one is especially important because this is my first post here and you're still getting to know me. I want you to understand the basis of how I come to my conclusions instead of having you read into or in-between the lines.

I also think I need to take a minute to explain that this blog represents my own personal views and is no way affiliated with my employer, their brands, or their views. If I say something stupid; it's on me.

I spent the first 28 years of my life on the east coast in the D.C. area. Which means I'm a little blunt, a lot impatient, and I tend to speak then think. Actually writing is a good cure to that last one because it forces me to examine my thoughts before I make them public. At 28 I moved to Seattle and have been here for the last 8 years and loving every minute of it.  I'm pretty sure that the laid back atmosphere of the west coast has softened me up a bit. But I still stick out like a sore thumb.

I'm not your classic nerd or geek. I like sports, I'm in shape, and I don't play a lot of video games; especially not first person shooters. I built my first computer around age 10 (around 1987) and have been in love with them ever since.

I have no particular brand affinity, only preferences, which change frequently. I'm not a Microsoft/Apple/Google fan-boy and don't wait in line for products in general, though I'll wait in looooooooooooooong lines for movies.

I've been a professional software engineer on Unix, Linux, Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android for the past 14+ years and am fluent in the C, C++, Objective-C, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, and PHP languages; iOS, Android, Rails, and .NET frameworks; Unix, Windows, and OS X operating systems.  I use Windows and OS X at work and Linux (Slackware mostly but also Debian and Ubuntu) at home.

I tend to make my technology choices based on what I want to do and not what I'm most familiar with doing. I tend to favor Linux at home for my critical software (email, calendar, shared data access, etc) because it's more open standard based which means I can find clients to access my data on my other operating systems, it's free, and it's extremely easy to maintain and administer after you've got it setup and running. I can honestly say I've had to reboot my Linux server(s) less than 20 times in the past 14 years and the majority of those reboots were for kernel updates.

I currently use an Android phone (GS3) but have also used the Palm Treo, the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and Palm Pre as my primary phones over the past 6 years.  Sorry Windows Phone, I hate the Windows Phone UI so it's a non-starter for me.

I've written high scale/high performance/low latency enterprise server side software, desktop software, and mobile software throughout my career. I have written hundreds of apps for iOS and Android professionally for several different companies over my career and a few for Windows Phone 7.

Everyone has their biases and now hopefully you know enough about me to filter mine out. :)