I’m Zach Burlingame, a software developer living and working in the Washington, D.C. area. I consider myself a software development generalist at this point as I continue to have my hands in numerous languages, platforms, and architectures.
The Early Years
As a kid growing up, I was always fascinated by computers and technology. I helped friends build their machines, programmed my Ti-83 calculator, and played a number of computer games. Since we didn’t have a computer in our house, it wasn’t until freshman year of college that I got my own computer. It was then that I dove in head first to all-things-computer and software development.
I went to Virginia Tech where I received my B.S. in Computer Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. In college I dealt primarily with C/C++ on both Windows and Linux. From the hardware side I worked on everything from RLC circuits to TTL, microcontrollers (68HC11) to system-on-a-chip (AT91M7) and of course PC.
Workin’ Man
I entered the workforce full-time as an engineer for a large, well-known international corporation where I spent five years. While there I worked on a number of projects, big and small, in areas such as network security, social network analysis, and modeling & simulation. Following my time there, I went to work for another large international corporation where I continue to this day.
The dynamic nature of the environments I’ve worked in has allowed me to be exposed to a number of different programming languages and platforms. For example, I’ve written network protocol code in C, application integration code in C#, backend data-access layers with both T-SQL and Hiberate, and graph analysis tools in C++.
Why Blog?
Like so many other bloggers out there, my primary reason for doing it is for my own personal benefit. So many times I research a particular topic or solution only to need to it again months or years later. While I do keep notes around for myself that I can refer to later, the easiest way for me to access these anytime, anywhere is on the Internet. By publishing them on a public blog, maybe others can benefit from it as well. Another benefit of blogging is that it allows me to form my thoughts and ideas more completely as well as ingrain solutions deeper into my memory.