Steele Bit programming & development musings by Andrew Steele

My post What's in a Name should provide a general sense of who I am but if you are really interested read on.

My name is Andrew Steele. I am married, have two dogs and work for Sandia National Laboratories as a Programmer Analyst. Which is an overly complicated way of saying computer programmer or software engineer.

The internet is fully integrated into my daily activities. I am the epitome of a digital native. As a curious professional looking to improve I spend a lot of time participating and lurking on Stack Overflow. I get more out of my Twitter account than my Facebook account. I spend a lot of time reading about computers and technology.

I am an avid road cyclist, snowboarder, hiker, and UNM Basketball fan. Thankfully, living in the City of Albuquerque in the Land of Entrapment Enchantment (New Mexico) allows for plenty of opportunities to pursue these passions. During the summer I tend to spend enough time outdoors to cultivate a serious farmer's biker's tan.

I have been enamored with computers since I was a toddler. I became interested in programming when I figured out how to tweak the variables in the turn based artillery game Gorillas. A few years later with a friend I built my first web site which received a cool rating from Yahoo!. This happened because at the time our site was one of only a few that featured Doom 2 WADs. This was pretty awesome until my parents received a bill for the bandwidth (hard for a kid to explain in 1995). During high school and the early part of college I worked for America Online. When AOL lost its identity during the Time Warner merger and subsequent fallout from the dot-com bubble I took an internship with Sandia and have been there ever since.

After a four year hiatus I decided to return to school to earn another master's degree. With the support of my employer in the fall of 2009 I started the Master of Science in Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. The experience has been rewarding and I've enjoyed being a student again.