About me

I'm a software developer, and programming is a love of mine. I work primarily with object oriented design and development, and I'm intrigued by extreme programming practices. Right now, I'm lucky to be working with my favorite language, Ruby. A lot of my prior experience has been working with languages like C# and Java, and their surrounding technologies.

I got started in programming while in high school. I took BASIC and then Pascal. I was lucky enough to realize that I wanted to do software development for a living, so that is what I pursued in college. After I graduated college and interned for a short while, I landed my first position working on a law firm's intranet. At that position, I learned a lot of bad practices, and saw the sad truth of how most development shops are ran. After a year, I was at the point where I had the experience to be able to leave, so I happily moved on. I knew that there had to be better out there, and that programming professionally wasn't just about putting nasty hacks in all day. I went on to work on a startup project where I was introduced to the just released .NET framework. I was fortunate to work with a guy that really knew his stuff, and I was introduced to the practical real world use of OOP. I started learning better practices. I had my passion back for programming and once again looked forward to the future. From that point on it has been mostly Java and C# that I've worked in. At home, I enjoy tinkering around with other more powerful languages that are rarely used in your average software shop. Ruby is my favorite language to work with. Up until recently, working with a language like Ruby at work would have been just a wish. Thanks to the openness of my current employer, they trust our team to use whatever technologies we prefer. Given that, our team butched up and started working on projects using Ruby, and decided that the risks that come along with using a more esoteric technology would be well worth it.

I currently work at a small financing company, building their internal and external systems. It is by far the best place I've worked at, simply because the owners actually know how to run a business successfully. They trusted me and a couple of friends to come in, help establish, and grow their development shop by giving us complete control of our own realm. We created an environment that embraces open source and uses XP practices such as pair programming, test driven development, continuous integration, etc. This was the first place I've worked that gave me the power to do all of these things, and we are all benefitting from it. I look forward every release we do, not just to see my own work complete, but because I want to see the company benefit from everybody's ideas put to practice through our software. It truly is a special place.

I'm happily married and live in the Kansas City area with my beautiful wife, out dog, and our 2 cats. In my spare time, I like to fish and golf. I also enjoy shredding on my Gibson SG guitar.

Please do not hesitate to drop me a message about any thoughts you may have about the content of this site. You can email me at allen@allenriddle.com. Thanks.