[obinto] peter royal

[Peter Royal <pr...@apache.org>]

On Thursday 06 June 2002 05:29 am, Sylvain Wallez wrote:
> Too late for the vote, but welcome aboard guys !

thanks! here's the obinto:

As most probably figured out, my name is also Peter (actually Peter Allen 
Royal JR if you care). I'm 24, will be 25 this august 5th.  I was born in New 
Orleans, LA, USA and lived there for my first 7 years. My family then moved 
to the Baltimore, MD area where I went from 3rd-8th grades. We then moved 
down to Jacksonville, FL where I am currently (mostly).

My first computer experiences were in Baltimore. I remember we got an Apple 
2c+ around 85-86, and a 2gs shortly after they came out (with the virtual 
80286 card inside too!). My first programming experience was sometime in the 
late 80's, a local community college did a 'computer camp' in the summer that 
I attended. The first level was doing BASIC and LOGO, and then after that 
progressed on to some simple Pascal.

After we have moved to FL, I commandeered the 286 IBM PC (With EGA and 32mb 
HDD!!) from my Dad's office that closed in MD for myself. On that I 
discovered the local BBS scene. (We moved with 1 month to go in my 8th grade 
year, thus I only have a month to attempt to make friends down in FL, which 
didn't work well. Thus I spent a lot of quality time with the PC my first 
summer in FL). I quickly decided to run my own BBS and then also wanted to 
customize it. The choices were pay money to get the C code for WWIV, or there 
was a copy of a old version of Telegard (which was Turbo Pascal) floating 
around in the underground. I choose the latter and taught myself enough TP to 
hack it to shreds (but alas it was all lost when a Stacker drive crashed on 
day.. )

I graduated from high school in '95 and went on to the University of Florida 
(Gainesville, FL) to study Computer Engineering. I quickly changed that to 
Computer Science, since the CE track seemed to be oriented more towards very 
low-level hardware interaction programming, and I enjoyed the higher-level 
abstractions. I got as far as the 'Data Structures and Algorithms' before 
getting bored of that. The DS&A class started with data structures, most of 
which I had already figured out from my Pascal experience. The algorithms 
were very neat and I enjoyed that. But I hated doing homework, and hated even 
more having to do so in C++ which wasn't taught in the class but we were 
expected to be masters when we walked in. So I changed my major to 
Mathematics (the prereqs were the same). 

About halfway through my college career I got a job as the IT manager at the 
unofficial school newspaper. They had a WFWG 3.11 server running the place 
crashing left and right and I slowly upgraded them to a nice Linux + Samba 
machine (that they still run!). I also played around with mod_perl on the 
intranet making interfaces to the printer paper usage logs and phone system 
logs.

That was my first taste of working full time, even though I was still in 
school on the side. I also had a part-time job writing an MS Access-based 
system for the State of FL used to track children that were wards of the 
state / involved in their assistance programs.

I did most of my math degree, all except the Advanced Calculus courses, and 
about 20-credits worth of general education. In '99 my part-time job came to 
an end as they wanted someone full-time (I was doing it remotely) and 
on-site. The IT manager job didn't pay well at all (non-profit) and was 
getting boring, since everything worked all the time and I had a lack of 
motivation to do anything new and exciting then.

So I called a friend of my that ran a SW company back in Jacksonville that I 
had an open employment offer with and took him up on that. I really wanted to 
get into mod_perl-based web development at that point, but he ran a MS-based 
consulting business, so I begrudgingly learned VB. I did that for almost 2 
years, until last February or so.

There was another company in town that was looking to modernize its ancient 
system, and they wanted to re-write in Java (The SW was originally written 
for the WANG minicomputer. Wang is gone and it runs on x86 now due to an 
emulator. They didn't want to get caught in the same hw-vendor dependence 
again). I was originally going to contract out to this company for a few 
months, but we ended up merging (this was right as the US .com bubble was 
bursting, so merging with a profitable company was a good move).

Which brings me here! A friend pointed me towards Cocoon as a possible 
presentation-layer framework, and I latched onto v2 (a little over a year ago 
now!). We initially tried to use EJB's as the business objects, but they 
were too much of a pain to create. We opted for a home-grown O/R mapping to 
support the completely un-normalized DB schema that was inherited (need to 
interoperate w/the legacy system until the transition period is over). Its 
all heavily based on the Avalon Framework + hosted in Phoenix.

When not sitting in front of the computer (which I do a lot), I love to play 
with music (living room DJ :) I fell in love with electronic music via the 
.mod and demo scene in the BBS era and then found the meatspace counterparts 
(rave!) in college. I also enjoy dabbling with computer graphics, but I 
haven't had much time in the recent past to do much with it (plus I think the 
gimp UI sucks compared to Photoshop, and since my machine machine is a linux 
box, I have no photoshop. Mac OS X looks very appealing.. ).
-pete

http://fotap.org/~osi <-- my very neglected web presence

-- 
peter royal -> proyal@apache.org

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