Here I am right before I started coding...

 

1981 - Marched with the Crossmen Drum & Bugle Corps. A wonderful experience. Met many friends, learned about competition, teamwork, hard-work.

1982 - St Mary's College of Maryland - studied percussion with the great Nora Davenport. She was a amazing teacher and left this world much too soon.

1983-1985 - Penn State - liberal arts focus. JoePa!

1984 - Started studying Jazz with Jaki Byard. Jaki was a great musician and a fantastic teacher. He was so kind to a young kid who called him up one day out of the blue and asked "Can I come study with you?" I drove 4 hours each way to his house in Hollis Queens once a month. 

1986 - 1991 - Musician. Had my own band - "The Jef Armstrong Quartet", with Sean Swinney, Willie White, and various bass players. Also worked at several computer stores and repair shops.

1990-1991 - Took a year off. Wrote a computer diagnostic program that tested hard drives, memory, video, ports, etc. Began getting some traction before running out of funds. 

 

1991 - 1998 - Muze Inc (now RoviCorp)

Senior Technical Architect. Muze is an entertainment information company that created and maintains databases cataloging the entire music, video and book industry. With this database Muze creates public access interactive touch-screen kiosks and supplies on-line web customers with data.

Lead architect and developer for Muze in-store information kiosks. Developed Muze for Music, Muze for Video and Muze for Books, which BookSelling magazine called “...the most intelligently organized, book-reader oriented bookselling and researching tool yet devised.”

 

1998 - 2003 - barnesandnoble.com

Director of Search Technology.  Sole architect and lead developer of a world-class search engine of which Jakob Nielsen wrote, “BN is lean and fast. It’s easy to find books here, even if you misspell the author’s name.”

Responsible for all design and development of search engines, search related back-end systems, tools, and related front-end web pages. Search engine indexes 3.5+ million books and has handled billions of searches since being launched in 2002.

The search engine is a multi-threaded C++ application that includes: extensible relevance algorithm, synonyms, dynamic sorting, completely data-driven design, advanced spell checker, and more. Backend-end systems analyze daily traffic and allow editorial staff to effect specific book positioning in search results.

 

2003 - Present - Semandex Networks Inc

Principal Software Engineer. We develop software for military intelligence organizations. Our software has been used by the Marine Corps, DARPA, NCTC and others. Our main software product, Tango, is a web-based tool to help organize and analyze vast amounts of data.

 

2009 - Present - Fuzzi Tail Software LLC

Joined up with my brother Jon to make games for the iOS devices. Our first game, mondrian, has been a critical success.

"...the puzzles can be quite challenging. By challenging, I mean stuff-your-head-in-a-blender challenging. Die-hard puzzlemeisters will love this to death." - Djflippy on iTunes review.

Our second game, Tapnastics, is a new and unique take on rhythm/music games which puts the drums in the forefront and challenges you to tap along with some of the most iconic and influencial drum beats in history.

 

Skills

iOS development. Objective-C, C, C++, Java, Javascript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Design, UI/UX Designer, and more...

 

Fun Facts:

My Dad wrote Modular Programming in COBOL.