General Overview

Born in Guatemala to American parents and raised primarily throughout Central and South America, I've been programming professionally for over 20 years. After attending Louisiana State University, I trained at the US Naval Nuclear Power School and served in the Navy as an Engineering Laboratory Technician. Later, computer programming afforded me the opportunity to work around the world, including Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Spain, Hungary, Philippines, and the Ukraine. For the last 10 years, I've focused primarily on Perl, but have also become proficient in other languages including C#, PHP, XQuery, and most recently Lisp (Common Lisp and ELisp). Though I have spent most of my career as a contractor, I've also had the privilege to work in a more traditional sense with companies like Computer Data Systems, NetStar Argentina, and Microsoft. Currently, I work for R.R. Bowker, LLC., the sole dispenser of ISBNs for the United States. As a Senior Programmer Analyst, I design and develop new applications that manage, serve, and analyze large data sets consisting of meta data for all books in print. I live in New Orleans with my wife Tracy and two of my children.

How I Work

• I use Emacs. I customize it to do a lot of my work. I like that it can go to the outside world to fetch data, test code, and so on. I also like that I can completely change and extend the way that the editor manipulates text. See my post The Road to Emacs for more on all of this.
• All my hardware runs Linux. I have a legal copy of Windows XP installed on a VMWare Server virtual machine, but there are no copies of Windows on any real hardware around here. I like Windows and certainly I don't have anything against that platform (I recommend it sometimes), but for work I need the flexibility that only Linux can provide.
• My main workstation is a dual-screen, 4-core HP machine with 6GB of RAM. The machine is running Ubuntu Linux 7.10 with Compiz Fusion. My laptop cost me $350 at Best Buy, and, after a little Linux magic, it outperforms many far more expensive laptops and it has a 3D user interface. See my post titled Gateway ML3109 for more on this.
• These days, most of my programming is in Perl, XQuery, or Lisp.
• I've been working with Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, and Naive Bayes classifiers. I like that kind of work.
• I try hard to stick to technologies that maximize my productivity.
• When programming, I prefer to use languages that support advanced features like first class functions, closures, meta programming, and so on. In my opinion, Lisp is the most advanced computer programming language known to mankind, and the progress of most other computer languages consists largely of implementing more and more Lisp features.
• I like coding with syntax-coloring on a black background. I work in the dark, with a backlit keyboard and mouse.
• I like writing and I write a great deal at work (documentation, instructions, status reports, and so on). I recently wrote an article for IBM Developer Works: How XQuery extends XPath