Background
I was born in 1974 to parents that were both doctors. However fortunately, none of that gooey medical stuff wore off on me. I had an interest in physics, but didn't find a specialty that I liked enough to pursue a Ph.D in it. For my Master's thesis I developed a VB 6.0 program that corrected old maps using satelite images. Old maps might be different from one another, and in some cases roads or features might be more than 50 meters from one another when you place adjacent maps next to each other. But without knowing which image was the truth, it could be difficult to evaluate which road to fix. But satelite images provided a truth that could be used to rectify the maps. The thesis project was mostly about how to use full automation to isolate the intersections in both image types and then apply the best fit transform to the map to make it fit as closely as possible to the main image.
After I graduated, it was tough finding work. This was largely because I had no idea what I was really trying to find work in, and my starting point was my parents' retirement house in the middle of nowhere in central Florida. I did find work working for Sun Orchard for a while. I started literally pushing 55 gallon drums of juice around on an assembly line for minimum wage. I was able to work my way up in the company and innovated lots of great stuff. I designed a new inventory management tool in VBA, innovated a label roll measuring ruller that could give more accurate estimates of label counts for partial rolls of labels, designed a fully automated tool to submit production information from excel to the telnet accounting software, and a system in excel to retrieve the orders in the system and create color coordinated shipping labels.
I was then able to work for two years for MACTEC engineering and consulting. This was my first exposure to the consulting world, and a large part of the work was engineering oversight for environmental remediation projects. I also began to work with the MapWindow ActiveX control in order to make my own very simple map application.
Having made connections to Dan Ames and his team I then took an opportunity to persue a Ph.D. at Idaho State where I developed mapping software in C#. In a project funded by the EPA, I developed my own pit-filling algorithm that was much faster than the one that was in ArcGIS at the time. Subsequent research showed that a similar strategy had been published in 2001, and so I did further work implementing both strategies, and developing a hybrid new strategy that took the best elements from each, for an even faster calculation. I also extended the algorithm to support huge grids by handling the dependencies at the boundaries, enabling the algorithm to be performed one step at a time.
I then did lots of work developing the DotSpatial GIS Software framework. This is a fully functional utility that supports a GIS map, an independant but connectable legend control, topology utilities derived from the NTS project, which is a port of the popular Java Topology Suite, as well as a port of the popular Proj4 library. Acting together the utility was built entirely in .Net, with an optional connection to a GDAL data provider plug-in. The GDAL plug-in allows for support of a wide range of image formats, including the various popular wavelet formats like ECW, SID, and JPEG2000
You can read more about my dissertation here: Dissertation 2010
In 2010 I graduated and got a job in Sacramento working for GEI Consultants Inc. There I have been developing new skills using Netbeans to program Java in addition to continuing to work in C#. I have developed some tide modeling softare derived from a FORTRAN program that performed the same role. I have also developed utilities for working with levee inspections that are being conducted by the USACE on Sacramentos.