Armpit Studios?! What’s that?

Before I was a programmer, I was a musician. During some of my college days, I was living in Ottumwa, Iowa, which is known as the armpit of Iowa by many Iowans. There was nothing to do in that town, and college bored me, so I spent most of my time recording weird songs in my apartment. When I put them on a tape, I jokingly attributed them to being recorded at Armpit Studios. I liked the name and continued to use it for music, video, programming, woodworking, and anything else creative that I made.

My first real app released to the world was a game; Wheel of Fortune, written in THINK Pascal on a Mac SE. It was included on a shareware floppy at one point. Since then I’ve honed my skills by working as a developer for real companies. My first real gig was at MultiAd. I worked on 3 different major versions of Creator there, with 2 of them being ground–up rewrites, including having to do minimal support on a DOS box for the Windoze version. After they decided they no longer needed software engineers, I worked at MakeMusic. That was really fun, but thanks to the greedy jerk who bought the company, nearly the entire development staff was let go after I’d been there for only a few years. Now I’m writing internal software at RR Donnelley, which is great. Lots of Cocoa and AppleScript.