In college, my meteorology professor also owned a private weather company.  One day in class, he was talking about the job outlook for meteorologists and said if you can forecast, you have a good chance of getting hired somewhere or at his company.  He then added that if you can forecast AND have some computer programming skills, he would hire you right away.  Sitting there in class, without any computer skills (I hated it at the time) I decided I needed to learn.  I ended up teaching myself Perl and C in my spare time and became obsessed with the power and opportunities it provided.

The last six months of college, I ended up working as a research assistant for said professor using my computer programming skills.  I graduated college on a Friday and started work for said professor’s private weather company the next Monday.

I spent 5 years writing Perl and TCL scripts while also developing GUI’s for the our forecasting department using Tk. I also helped improve our forecasting system by maintaining and developing new software which was written in C.  While I didn’t build any databases myself, I did gain experience with MySQL queries and interacting with databases in Perl, TCL, and C.  Unfortunately my position was cut in August 2012 due to corporate downsizing.

In January 2013, I started a job at CenturyLink in Minneapolis where I was contracted to help with software development. My contract ended at the end of September but during that time I gained useful experience in front and back end development of web applications combining Perl, CGI and SQL along with HTML and CSS. I also gained experience with SQL writing Perl scripts to gather information, creating new tables, and inserting data into the database.

Languages: Perl, TCL, C, Tk, CGI and SQL.

I’ll never forget that day in class when my professor mentioned how having computer skills would be an asset in the job market.  My creative side started to get the itch to learn more about web development.  It started with WordPress and getting to know the workings of it all so I could develop my own WP pages with custom PHP code inserted inside.  This eventually lead to my current adventure, bleacherweather.com.

I’ve spent almost 2 years now developing bleacherweather.com from the ground up.  This has provided me with valuable experience with HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, PHP, as well as some AJAX and jQuery.  I also have custom Perl scripts running that aggregate data that is displayed on the site through the aforementioned programming languages.

Languages: HTML, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, XML. Some jQuery and AJAX.