I started out my professional life pursuing a psychology degree.  I was interested in a phenomenon called synesthesia.  This is a very rare condition where a person will have multiple sensory experiences to a single stimulus - e.g., they may hear a sound and see a color, or taste a flavor and feel a shape, or rub a textured surface and hear a noise.  I loved the research, but teaching was what I looked forward to every day.  But it didn't matter, because one day - at a very specific moment - I realized I would never survive in academia.

So after six years of eeking out a life and earning a BA and MA, I decided to scrap it all and go back to my roots and do the thing I've loved the most since I was nine years old: making software.  It's been a unique experience, having no formal training but a lifetime of effort from which I can draw has provided me with some formidable projects and obstacles over the years.

At present in my day job I'm a software engineer with 14 years of professional experience.  I try to stretch my abilities into other areas too, such as documentation and project management.  I enjoy feeling useful and being a jack-of-all-trades, so much so that when people ask me what I specialize in, I reply "learning things."  I tend to gravitate toward projects that require knowledge I don't have yet, such as integration projects, platform hosting, reverse engineering, or hardware interfaces.

My dream job?  That's easy: working on software used for software development.  Or making toys.

In my other life I work hard to raise a house full of iron-willed and fire-bellied girls.  I seem to recall being about 15, praying hard that women would start paying attention to me, then I heard the shadow of some hearty laughter, but never really understood what that was all about until recently...

And in all the spare time I have left, I ignore a wide variety of wonderful personal hobbies such as fiction writing, woodworking, bandaging my bloody fingers, cycling, songwriting, playing classical guitar poorly, renovating my home, repairing my home renovations, listening to all kinds of music (but mostly Tom Waits and Slavic folk music), cooking, and the occasional nogoodnicking.

What's beefy about beefycode.com?

I garnered a nickname in grad school: beefarino.  Yes, it's from Seinfeld.  It started out as my player name for daily Quake sessions in the computer labs and on local servers at the University of Arizona.  It really stuck once I went vegetarian, and was soon shortened to just "beef" by my friends. 

So while the "beefy" in beefycode may be an adjective for the physique of the code you'll find on this site, it's really identifying the author.