An Evolving Career Path

As you can probably guess, I’ve always been interested in technology.  My career didn’t lead directly to mobile development though. I worked with tactical satellite communications in the Air Force and even earned a degree and certification for teaching English at the secondary level (essentially, high school).

I ended up at Treemo Labs by way of a buddy I had worked with at Western Washington University where we were web developers. I had finished my teaching internship, but the economy was weak and teaching jobs (particularly for someone with such limited experience) were not easy to come by. Fortunately, I started up at Treemo doing web development and ended up leaning toward my current passion, mobile development.

I truly enjoy learning and tackling new challenges as well as working with technology and sharing that knowledge and experience with others.  One of the great things about mobile development is the unbelievable pace of change.  It wasn’t long ago that I could name all relevant Android devices and their specs, now it’s simply impossible to keep up.  Now I focus more on the software side of things, playing with all the newest OS features both announced and slipped in.

When I started at Treemo, the G1 and iPhone 3G were the primary devices.  The G1 could do far more than the iPhone and even had some features current iPhones still don’t have, but the iPhone’s narrower list of capabilities was generally executed much more smoothly.  The contrast was intriguing to me–and still is.  In 2009, we saw the Palm Pre come and go, the 3G update to the 3GS, and the G1′s angular cousin, the Motorola Droid, take off.  I had the opportunity to work with all of these devices and many more while at Treemo.  I also got to see the evolution of my skills alongside these changing devices.  I worked on the CBS News app for both Android and iOS as my intro into mobile development, not a bad start!  I developed a variety of Android apps (CNET News, Survivor, Rick Steves’ Audio Europe, etc.), learning from each experience.  Even the last app I developed at Treemo Labs was an opportunity to learn and grow; developing Big Brother gave me the chance to learn more about Honeycomb (and RenderScript in particular) than I would have thought possible, given the time constraints.

As much as I enjoyed working with the people at Treemo, it came time for me to move on. I won’t go into the details, but a lot of signs pointed to the need for a change. Fortunately, Android developers are in high demand, and an excellent opportunity has already come my way. I’ll have a separate post about that later on.