I started coding when I was doing a lot of scuba diving. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of scuba diving-related applications for the Mac OS. I wrote Mac GasBlender (a Nitrox, Trimix and Heliox blending application) and log plot (a perl script that created nice logbook pages from a UDCF file, including a depth graph and full tissue saturation graph using the Bühlmann ZH-L16 model). I also ported mPlan to Mac OS.

After I did my degree in Physiology (B. Sc., McGill University), I spent half of my career doing Marine Search and Rescue (SAR). My area of expertise was mostly SAR from fast rescue crafts (FRC) and first aid. During that time, I worked as a lifeguard, ski patroller, first aid instructor, FRC crew member with the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG), FRC coxswain (CCG), FRC Instructor, Leadership Instructor, SAR and Environmental Response (ER) Instructor and finally, Superintendent of SAR/ER training department at the CCG College. I also wrote the SAR Seamanship Reference Manual. Since I had been teaching a lot during that time, I decided to do a Masters Degree in Education with a specialization in IT. It is while doing this degree that I came up with the concepts for the Learning Object CMS.

For various reasons, I left Search and Rescue behind and I am now working full time in IT, where I am in charge of a team of web developers. This new career allowed me to develop my programming skills much further. I taught myself PHP, MySQL, Grails, HTML5, iOS and Android programming by tackling work-related and swimming-related projects (I joined a team of Masters Swimmers and found a couple of programming projects worth pursuing, like the MyMSC App and our club’s web site).

I also ended up being in charge of various servers and application hosting platforms, where I developed quite an interest (and skill) for DevOps.