My Resume / Education / Qualifications

I feel that the best place to start is by posting my resume and some of my achievements.  So without anymore to say about this, my resume can be found here: Phil’s Resume (Updated 8/18/2011).  I am always open to hearing about potential better positions, so I will always keep a somewhat updated version of my resume online for your convenience. I would ask that you be considerate though and contact me only if you are the employer, I don’t want to hear from recruiters unless I contact them first.  For the most part, I’m only interested in positions located in the Greater New York City area, although I’d be open to other areas based on relocation package offerings.

Here is a short list of my achievements:

Release of Matthouse Web Hosting – October 2005, Humphrey, NY
National Honor Society: 2004-2006 – Ellicottville Central School
Certified CRLA Peer Tutor – May 2006 : Ellicottville Central School
Computer Science Award – June, 2006 : Ellicottville Central School
Regents Diploma – June, 2006 : Ellicottville Central School
Release of podnet.org: Spring 2008
Deans List – Spring 2008 : University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
Release of Famousphil.com: Fall 2008
Release of adminreferece.com: Spring 2009
Deans List – Spring 2009 : University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
Release of Exchange Hosting on Matthouse – July 2009
Acceptance into MS program for computer science — September 2009
Teaching Assistant for CSE116 (Java 2) – Fall 2009
Fall 2009 – Lecture Series – Developing a Website (for novice users)
Teaching Assistant for CSE111 (Intro to CS Concepts) – Spring 2010
Release of SVN Hosting @ Matthouse – March 2010
Teaching Assistant for CSE113 (Intro To Programming, Non Majors) – Fall 2010
Teaching Assistant for CSE111 – Spring 2011
Web Lecture Series – Spring 2011
Bachelors / Masters Combined Degree in Computer Science, University at Buffalo – May 24, 2011
job offer accepted – Conceptual.ly (July, 2011 – Present)

My Story

Hi, welcome to my website! As you probably have guessed, my name is Phil. I guess the first good place to start is that I’m beginning to see the world in a whole new light after working now for well over a month!  This page is dedicated as a life-long blog that I started 5 years ago that details a little bit about my past, present, and future endeavors!

Lets begin with a little bit about myself.  My birthplace residence resides in the little town of Humphrey, NY, which is about 60 miles south of Buffalo, NY.  Early on on my career, my location prevented me from advancing with technology as fast as I would have liked to.  However, through determination and perseverance, I have managed to get by with what little technology I was given.  I inhabited a very rural community that had (and still has) about 800 residents and thousands of acres of farm land.  I have since relocated to New York City for a software development job, I live in Chelsea which is in the lower part of Manhattan.

I began using computers at Ellicottville Central School around 1995. During school, there was this certain period of time  where our class would go to a computer room (full of macs) for educational purposes.  We were required to complete educational puzzles with this software called “Success Maker.”  It wasn’t until about 1997 that I was introduced to the Internet. My first website was Dogpile (a popular search engine at the time).  Basically our teacher took us to Dogpile and taught us how to search for information pertaining to our research paper assignment.  I remember that I had to write about Yellow Stone National Park and that it had to be entirely typed.  Unfortunately, due to my lack of computing abilities, it took me over 2 weeks of 30 minute computer classes (I’d guess 6 hours) to type a 3 page handwritten paper consisting of 100 words (yeah…. 3 words per line was my average at the time).

In 1998 for another paper, I remember having to bring home a portable computer from school.  This take home computer was part of some test to see if the school would order more (which never did happen).  I knew that I was a very slow typer (this was my second time typing a somewhat lengthy  paper) so I felt that it would be best to get one of these.  I’m dedicated, so I spent the entire night (about 8 straight hours) typing up that paper.  Some students lost their work on those computers and had to do it all over again, but thankfully, my data was copied in tact and I was left spell checking my work before printing it off.  I finished in time and luckily everything worked out well!

I began working with computers at home in early 1998 with a Texas Instruments home computer from the late 1970′s. It had 4k of internal memory and was capable of BASIC (yes, that is a language, and surprisingly its still used in some hardware controllers today).  I wrote a few programs on this computer by replicating what the manual had written in it. I don’t remember spending a lot of time with this computer because my typing skills were awful and I didn’t really have the urge to learn how to program back in those days.  It wouldn’t be until about 2001 that I was required to take a course with Mrs. Kaminski on proper typing.  She introduced me to so many opportunities later on that I simply can’t thank her enough for.

I later got my first real computer in 2001. It was a 386 machine with Dos 6.0 and Windows 3.1. When I first got the computer, I loved to experiment and that led to my formatting the system and reinstalling everything from scratch at least a few hundred times.  With the help of my aunt and friends, I learned how to utilize this computer for what it was capable of.  I also learned how to reinstall operating systems and properly set up a computer with this excursion.  In addition, I began figuring out how properly use the command line to talk with this computer. I got rid of this computer in 2009 because of its age (I’d assume the battery died and I didn’t really see a reason to replace it).

My first modern computer was a 800 mhz Micron PC with a whopping 128MB of RAM and loaded with Windows ME.  It was purchased as a Christmas present in 2001.  This computer provided my first real experience with the Internet and software maintenance at home.  I remember that I would spend hours on this computer reinstalling the operating system to figure out how I could optimize the very poorly implemented Windows ME from Microsoft (it is the worst OS ever, even worse than Windows Vista!).  During this time in my life, I managed to learn about all the dangers of the Internet.  Along with this, I have discovered proven methods of preventing these dangers before they become a threat.  Although this computer was fully functional only 10% of its entire life, it provided an invaluable learning experience for my future computer work.

Instant messaging is a popular way to communicate in my generation, it also brings many dangers with it.  I can remember one instance in 2002 when I installed Yahoo Instant Messenger and got a virus on my computer.  I blamed it for years without fully understanding what caused the virus that day.  I began labeling it as malware for the longest time.  I now realize that it was due to me clicking on something without thinking first (and the lack of virus protection).  I now use Yahoo Instant Messenger after several friends pressured me into giving it another try around 2005. I haven’t looked back since.

From 2001 until 2005, I continued to learn how computers worked. Sometime in 2003, I began repairing computers as a side job. By this time, I knew a vast amount about how computers worked and was able to successfully repair most of my first computer repair jobs. However, I once lost valuable email information for a client when I didn’t realize that Windows stores data in hidden locations of the computer. Since this time, I have been learning many new tricks about how Windows operates. I have also learned how uneducated many computer users are.

In early 2004, I began learning about server operating systems. Thanks to my Aunt, I obtained a copy of Server 2000 to play with. Although it was up 1% of the time, I learned how to successfully break, maintain, and deploy Windows Server 2000.  This has helped me in many environments that I would face in the upcoming years, including my own Exchange / IIS environment.

Around the same time, I became a Technology Assistant at Ellicottville Central School. During this time, I was introduced to professional network technicians and administrators who work in the IT field.   During my Technology Assistant tenure at Ellicottville Central, I solved many computer related problems for teachers and administrators alike.  I was provided the opportunity to perform maintenance to production servers.  I was introduced to concepts that I thought weren’t even possible until then.  I also gained invaluable experience in replacing computer components during this time.  My tenure as a Technology Assistant was the most awesome role I’ve ever taken while in high school and I wouldn’t trade the experience I gained there for anything (Thanks to Mrs. Hunt for that opportunity!).

In September of 2005, my computer oriented world began to accelerate.  I began my web development career as a Frontpage Web Developer.  This is the same time that I purchased Matthouse.us and began to offer web development to the local community.  Through this venture, I have learned a lot about how to develop websites.  I also learned how to deal with customers professionally such as Dr. Illig at the Ellicottville Dental Group.  Soon after this, I also got into Linux web server administration and the true meaning of maintaining professional uptime.  Although I’m not a huge fan of being technical support (mostly due to the lack of time), I currently host several websites.  If you were to ask me for hosting space today, I might accept you as a client, depending on your needs.

Shortly after I began my own website, I became a fan of Kim Possible. I became a member at SaveDisneyShows.org, and then later a staff member. In early 2007, I resigned from SDS (I simply didn’t enjoy the management responsibilities and damage control when dealing with young children and the internet) and moved to RonStoppable.net where I could begin as a new member who didn’t have any worries.  I resided on this site until early 2008 when I moved onto CodeCall to better align my interests with others (programming and systems administration).  I have since become inactive on CodeCall as well because of the lack of time between a full time job and blogging on my blog (which you’re reading now!).

The Kim Possible Fandom brought many good friends that I still chat with on occasion to this day.  It is also the reason why I’ve seen California and have had the opportunity to shake hands with the creators of Kim Possible.  One of my better friends from KP was Adam Humphreys and he taught me one skill that no one else probably could have taught me (since I didn’t enjoy formally doing it).  This skill was proper written English.  Adam annoyed me enough to where I began learning proper English on my own to improve my own writing to prevent him from correcting me constantly.  Ever since I’ve learned the foundation of English (fairly well I’d imagine), I can now look back on my days with both Mrs. Illig and Mrs. Friel (the librarians at my old high school) and understand what they taught me with a much better understanding.

Beginning in 2006, I began as a Computer Engineering student at the University at Buffalo. I soon changed my major to Computer Science because of my [then] newly discovered dislike of calculus.  I guess I didn’t really dislike calculus (on the contrary, it always amazes me), but I didn’t understand it due to a crumbled math foundation that still haunts me to this day.  I constantly attempted to improve my mathematical foundation because it interests me, but I grew older and I simply was not as absorbent as I once was.  Through my experience at the University at Buffalo as a CS major, I met many new friends and had many opportunities opened up to me.

Beginning in 2009, I began working on my Masters Degree.  I was fortunate to be accepted into a new, accelerated degree program at the University at Buffalo that combines the Bachelors and Masters portions of a Computer Science degree together.  Since senior undergraduate students and first year graduate students are required to take the same courses, this program simply drops the undergraduate requirements for these courses, thus cutting a year of time and cost from the Masters degree (or roughly 20 thousand dollars).  For me, this made a lot of sense and I got my Masters degree out of the deal!  In addition, I was hired as a teaching assistant for introductory computer science courses.  I’ve TA’d for survey courses and for Java programming courses.  Being a TA has enabled me to become more patient with others who may not know as much as I do.  It also taught me how to effectively and gracefully deal with others in a more social environment (something, that up until then, I wasn’t very comfortable with being in).  It also gave me an opportunity to expand my knowledge of Computer Science, especially in Java, more particularly the swing graphics library and RMI!  After being a teaching assistant, I’m now comfortable with giving lectures to large groups of people and reading other’s code for error correction and learning new concepts.

I spent a lot of my time in graduate school focusing on expanding my knowledge of network and system administration through my own company, Matthouse, and through my Masters project.   My Master’s project had the original goal of implementing a Condor Flock.  Condor was developed by the University of Madison-Wisconsin and it enabled grid computing.  Grid computing can be thought of as several computers working in parallel to solve a single problem.  Grid computing typically uses compute power of computers that are geographically distributed around the world.  In my project, I successfully configured Condor and used it to approximate the solution to a two-dimensional bin packing problem.  In summary, the goal of this problem is to take several (possibly millions) of randomly generated rectangles and pack them together as tightly as possible.  This problem is considered NP-Hard in computer science because the true solution is computationally infeasible as the number of rectangles grows to infinity.  As a second portion to this project, I implemented the Hadoop Distributed File System in hopes of speeding up the solution approximation, because I was reading in files originally from a Network File System (NFS) mount.  As I found out in the end, HDFS was slower, mostly because HDFS is meant for very large scale problems, and millions of rectangles isn’t exactly the amount of scaling that HDFS was meant to handle (its meant to scale for much larger data sets).  The paper that accompanied this project was 58 pages in total and I’m still in the revision process because I wish to publish it at UB.  I have decided to release a rough copy of the paper, this may change though in the future.  You may obtain the paper here.

With my Masters degree in hand, I began looking at employment opportunities as a Systems Administrator.  I always tell employers that my true passion lies in Systems Administration, and I would hope that you can sense that from the topics that I tend to blog about.  I do have a passion in programming also, but I can’t maintain the type of thinking that is required for long periods of time while I’m programming, so ideally I’d prefer a job that requires me to do a little of both.  I’m simply not the type of person who likes to do the same thing over and over without learning anything!  Jobs like this are difficult to find on their own, but adding relocation requirements into the mix really makes finding a good job difficult.  Originally, my search focused in warmer areas of the US, but due to my lack of formal experience, my search was re-focused on New York City, where I knew I could easily get a job, even considering relocation as a problem (unlike someplace warm like Florida).  I also chose to focus on NYC because I knew several of my friends would be moving there as well in the near future, so I knew I always would have someone that I could meet up with (that I already knew).

About a month after beginning my search, I found a job through a friend at Conceptual.ly, as a programmer.  I realize this didn’t fit my original hopes for a job, but after so much difficulty and not finding a job at that point in mid July, I decided to open my sights up to a programming position as a way to step over to what I really want to do.  I’m a great programmer, and a very hard, honest worker, so I know deep down inside that once my talents are discovered, I probably wouldn’t have many issues jumping over to what I really want to do ultimately.  So without any further questions, I accepted a job offer at Conceptual.ly and I began officially on July 25, 2011; although I actually started a few days sooner with their programming duties.

About a month after working at Conceptual.ly, I realize more than ever that I’m truly a generalized person inside that enjoys knowing a lot about a lot of different areas.  I naturally love systems administration more than I like programming, so I’ve began the long, tiring, search for the ultimate job that I want for a very long time to come.  I’m well aware that this will take a lot of time to find, but I am willing to wait it out and find what I truly want before I make the next move in my professional career.  I know that I want a mixture of programming and systems administration with on call responsibilities, so now I just have to continue putting my name out there and see if I can get something huge that will last my life (and if I can’t, at least I can say I tried).

With the above said, I am very happy with my decisions thus far and I do enjoy my current position at Conceptually as a lead programmer, so I can’t see myself moving on until I’m sure that what I move onto will advance me at a professional level.  Life is definitely a learning experience, and even the more educated people such as myself make mistakes and learn from them.  But to take it a step further, I always try to learn from the mistakes of others too, and some say that is what makes a true genius.

Last but not least: I would like to wish the best of luck to all of the friends that I’ve made over the years and those that have helped me achieve my goals!  Naturally, there simply isn’t enough room on my blog to acknowledge everyone, but you should know who you are!

-updated 9/7/2011