While growing up in the 90's tech boom, even though I was too young for a personal computer, I still had an SNES and Sega Genesis that were played at every opportunity, with classic games including Sonic, Mortal Combat, Road Rash and Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island.

After a while, our Sega developed a neat little quirk where it would only play games when it was upside down and propped up against the wall at a specific angle. Boy, those were the days.

It wouldn't be until roughly the early 2000's when the family got its first desktop, which would ignite a passion for technology and gaming which continues to grow today.

Even though most of my time was spent playing solitaire, minesweeper and doodling in MS paint, eventually I would buy my first PC game, Sid Meier's Civilization 4.

After installing it, I played a marathon session of over 48 consecutive hours, and have been obsessed with the franchise ever since.

It wouldn't be until high school where my interest in on-line gaming really took over, specifically with MMORG's such as Guild Wars and World of Warcraft and FPS's like Battlefield and Counter Strike, after buying my first custom built rig for gaming.

While PC gaming consumed much outside of school time while not working my after-school job or playing sports, I still enjoyed the console classics of the time on my Xbox 360, including Fallout, Halo, Skyrim, Guitar Hero and Rockband

Then, after starting College, my focus turned from playing games to making games. Despite my busy schedule, I was still able to squeeze in an odd match of League of Legends or delve back into the world of Skyrim on occassion.

Shortly after moving to attend a course for video game design and development, my life changed dramatically.

Within the first few months there, I had developed a C++ poker evaluator algorithm as my first major coding project. When finished, my project outperformed those of my peers, as well as that of my instructor, which he would eagerly brag about to his colleagues, earning me recognition across campuses.

The game implements 5 common poker games, leveraging fundamental principles of number theory and static programming techniques to execute, analyze and compare hands of cards at a nearly instant time complexity.

This project is still my proudest accomplishment from that time, however the project source is not planned to be available any time soon.

One of the core components of the project, the Integer Sequence Library, is available on github here and has been ported to several languages, including C++, Python, PHP and Javascript.

The executable and associated static libraries may be released in the future, as development permits.

After that, my most notable projects were developing prototypes for a 3D DirectX-10 game which loaded levels and basic models and had a primitive combat system and UI, and two C# XNA titles which included a minecraft-esque farming simulator (including day/night cycle and growing crops with life-cycles) with real time xml editing tools (for level development), as well as a space-flight shooter featuring upgrade-able weapons of various types (including laser cannons, photon-torpedoes and proximity mines) for Xbox 360.

I also attended the Great Canadian App-athon in 2011 and 2012, which was a 72 hour coding contest involving all colleges and universities across Canada.

Nearing the end of my college career I was regularly working 16-18 hour days (sometimes even periods of 48 hours straight or more) to meet my school work load, while also pursuing my own side projects, including an interest in cryptography, but more importantly I would teach myself Python in my own time in hopes of adapting a bulky and cumbersome C++ template meta-programming markup language serialization library I personally wrote into a more elegant solution in Python.

After completing that, the goal then was to write a C++ application with the Python interpreter embedded within it, to leverage the added flexibility and modularity of Python.

The advent of a functioning markup language parser lead to the formalization of a written standard, that I personally developed and maintain to address many (personal) issues presented with both xml and json formats.

This project is not planned for release but may be a possibility in the future.

After graduation, I started an unpaid internship as an iOS/Objective-C mobile developer for a local independent studio.

During the internship I also supported myself through working full time at a temp agency. This required working 16 hours a day at 2 separate jobs for four months straight until I was hired to continue working as an iOS developer full-time.

As it was a small start-up, I was the sole developer working on their projects (with the owner/CEO being the artist), I played all roles from lead developer (including writing shell script build tools and photoshop scripts), to QA tester and Research and Development.

I was also responsible for all aspects of the life cycle of multiple built target applications which implemented a diverse tool chain.

Within my first year, roughly 10 applications had either been released or updated, of which the most successful app having over 3.5 million downloads and continues to be highly successful to this day.

Unfortunately, near the end of my employment with Sky Orchard Studios, I would suffer a devastating personal loss, with all of my personal hardware being stolen from my apartment.

This effectively resulted in the loss of all my projects, notes, source code, examples and backups of my entire life's work up to that point, causing a devastating professional set back, which, to this day, still has not been fully recovered from.

Going back to the temp agency, after the contract expired, I would take on various manual labour roles to survive.

After several months of factory work, I would finally get the opportunity to recover from the theft of my life's work, finally being able to purchase a laptop for a job as a web developer.

At this point in my career, I quickly taught myself javascript, html, css, php, and mySQL while on the job.

As a senior team member, I primarily supervised the interns assisting in their tasks, while simultaneously working on my own.

I worked closely with 1 other dedicated developer and a small group of 2-5 interns updating an Actionscript based web application to HTML5.

Unfortunately, the company would dissolve before the product could launch.

Afterward, at the age of 25, I would go on to secure employment at my former college, teaching the very course I had once taken not so long ago.

Shortly after beginning my new job, I became a father of an amazing son.

During that time, I worked 10-16 hours a day, teaching 2 separate classes and was responsible for managing groups between 4-12 students at a time.

Lectures included the foundational concepts of computer programming, software development, video game design and the software production life-cycle, with the course's primary focus being on Unity/C#, Xcode/Swift, Win32/DirectX-11, and mobile/web development using HTML and Javascript.

After a year, I decided to leave teaching to be a stay-at-home father, to raise my, by then, 1 year old son, while allowing my former spouse the opportunity to go back to both college and work after taking time off while we waited for our son to be accepted into a childcare program.

In my free time, I began further expanded my knowledge of graphics programming by developing exciting, easy to use, interactive examples and tools to help with visualization of abstract rendering concepts, while also working towards building a minimalist graphics engine for the web on my own.

Several months later I would eventually return to the industry, this time as a PHP and RPA solution developer for another local start-up serving various business clients in the Toronto and London areas, including GreenEarth.

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