Contact Info

I can be reached via email or by phone at: 805-768-4310 I ramble endlessly on my blog and I have accounts on the following services:  LinkedIn  Twitter  Facebook  GitHub  StackOverflow  HackerNews  Chess.com

A bit more about me

I've been happily married for over twenty years and I'm the proud dad to a bright and talented teenager named Kaitlyn. I'm also the son of Puerto Rican parents. I was born and raised in New York's South Bronx. I proudly consider myself Puerto Rican and play top boards for Team Puerto Rico on Chess.com. At an early age I showed an interest in science, writing and in games such as chess. I also developed an interest in eastern philosophies studying yoga and martial arts for most of my early youth.

Much of my professional life, spanning 20+ years, has centered around computing. I discovered computers in the early 1980's. The image on the left shows me working on an Othello (reversi) game at Saint Peter's College (1984) on a DEC PDP-11.

During the mid 80's I began working as a part-time programmer on CDC and Prime Mini Computers. However, it wasn't until 1986 that I began professional work at a small accounting business and a few years later at a Patent and Trademark service company. I spent four years working on business applications, the last of which was a check imaging application for IBM and the Security Pacific Automation Company, which was part of Security Pacific National Bank - later acquired by Bank of America. Shortly thereafter I transitioned from banking into consumer products. In 1990 I joined the Symantec - Peter Norton Group and later worked for a string of game companies.

By 2000 I helped ship over twelve commercial software applications and completed a ten year career as a developer and manager of consumer products. At that time I began focusing on the development of Internet applications in business computing.

Inspired by the SETI@home project in 2001 I began work on a personal project to create the largest distributed networked chess playing machine. I was joined a few months later by Colin Frayn and together with hundreds of volunteers we created ChessBrain. The ChessBrain project went on to receive a 2005 Guinness World Record as "The World's Largest Networked Chess Computer".

I've done a fare amount of writing. My work has been published by IBM, IEEE, O'Reilly, Prentice Hall, Springer, The Linux Journal and others.

For the past four year I've served as the Director of Software Development for a Merchant Services company. Just prior, I was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Group at Countrywide Financial Corporation.