I've been involved with computers since the age of seven, beginning with an original Color Computer 1 with 16K of RAM, programming in the BASIC language. After high school and some years off, I entered college to train as a Network Administrator. During this time, I pursued independently computer science topics, self-training myself in a number of languages including C, C++, and Java. My first professional position was as a maintenance programmer for a life insurance administration system written in COBOL running on IBM's iSeries/400 machine. I was soon promoted into the company's research and development department, working with J2EE and a number of other technologies. Due to the small size of the team, we were responsible for the entire development cycle: analysis, design, development, testing, documentation, server maintenance, and support. Since that time, I've gained experience in even more of the common J2EE development cycle, including web development and design. I've also had the opportunity to design and implement our underlying database structures. In production, DB2/400 is the database, but during development on personal workstations I've enabled our design to work seamlessly with MySQL as well. Personally, I'm committed to continuous learning. As such, I decided to continue with school, but the Computer Science programs were rather basic considering my real-world skills. I therefore decided to pursue a degree in Business and Administration, augmenting my technical skills with a strong combination of business skills. I graduated with a MBA in August of 2006. Personal hobbies include computers. I enjoy experimenting with other operating systems. WinXP and Linux serve as my primary choices, but I've also installed and used PC-BSD, various flavors of Linux, and Solaris 10 for x86.Specialties: Java and J2EE. Application design and development cycle. Mentoring junior programmers. Strong written communication skills.Tech Skill List:COBOL,Apache ANT,JDOM,Jakarta Struts,XML,SQL/JDBC,DB2/400,JavaScript,IBM/CL,HTML,CSS,Velocity,LDAP,Acord XML,Domino (iSeries),MySQL,IBM WebSphere,IBM WebSphere Studio,Eclipse,iSeries/400,Linux,Macromedia Dreamweaver,JMeter,PC (x86) Hardware,Apache Tomcat,Orion Application Server,CVS,C#,MS Windows 9x/NT/2K/XP,Apache Server, Hibernate, Spring Framework