My qualifications are informed by a lifetime of teaching, even when I didn’t realize it. I started reading at four, and by the time I was in elementary school, I was “writing” instruction manuals. I still recall the carefully illustrated guide to solving the Rubik’s Magic that I put together in fifth grade.

In high school, I taught myself to program. (Turbo Pascal was the first language beyond Basic I learned; anyone remember the book with the Porsche on the cover?) Shortly after, I began teaching the programming class to my peers. Before I graduated, I was teaching two different periods of computer classes’mostly because the actual teacher liked to drink at lunch and showed up loaded most afternoons!

Once I’d knocked out a bachelor of science degree in computer science, I worked in technology, primarily at telecoms. But I never could let go of what I loved most: I was not just a programmer and system administrator. I was the guy who could translate customer requirements into user stories. I was the guy who could talk... and I talked all the time. I also figured out you could talk through writing. I authored the bestselling technology book Java and XML, followed by a number of other books for O’Reilly Media, and eventually joined that company.

More recently, I returned to my developer roots and spent nearly eight years working with NASA’s Earth Science group. Never have I spent more time teaching, translating, and explaining what one group’s words meant to another, and ultimately telling the story of what NASA is doing through a flagship website and eventually a massive, organization-wide cloud platform. And no matter how much I learned about Amazon Web Services (AWS) or EC2 or Lambda, it was always the storytelling that was most interesting; even better, it was always the storytelling that seemed to interest most clients. I could speak to them, in a way that they understood, and that was a good thing (TM).

Now, I teach and tell stories full-time. I record AWS certification courses on video and write exam prep books in a way that’s actually more helpful for passing exams than rote memorization. I build websites and applications, small and large, most often for clients who have their own story to tell to their users. I write books on what I’ve learned and on how to tell stories the way I do.