About Mistakes and All

Welcome to Mistakes and All! In this blog I will share my adventures in software development. Throughout my life I have been on an unending journey of learning. When it comes to software, there is always something new to learn and no matter how much experience I have, I still make plenty of mistakes along the way. Hence, the title of the blog. I intend to share my experiences, "mistakes and all." I don't always get it right the first time and hopefully by sharing my mistakes it will save you from making the same ones.

Outside of my work as a software developer I am also an amateur pianist. I plan to use this blog to share videos of songs I perform on the piano. When it comes to playing piano, I'm definitely a bit of a hacker and I make mistakes all the time. However, I still want to push myself to share these videos. I'm not going to wait for the perfect take. If there are mistakes, so be it. I'm recording them for me, my family and my friends and hopefully you'll enjoy them too even if they contain a few flubbed notes here and there.

I will also share interesting articles and news about topics and causes I care about.

About Me

I am a full stack web and mobile developer. I love writing software. It's my life, not just a job. I got hooked on it when I was 8 years old after my parents got me a Commodore VIC-20 for Christmas. It was the best gift they ever could have gotten for me and led me to a wonderful career in software development. I have listened to over 700 episodes of .Net Rocks and love attending software conferences like DEVintersection.

I am a family man who loves music and am an avid runner.

Katelyn Bedard Bone Marrow Association

In 2005, we lost our daughter, Katie, to leukemia at the age of 3 when we couldn't find a matching bone marrow donor for her. My wife Joanne and I wanted to do what we could to spare other families from the same pain and tragedy. Together with a couple dozen family members and friends, we formed the Katelyn Bedard Bone Marrow Association in her memory. We have three objectives:

Raise awareness about the desperate need for bone marrow donors and encourage people to join the bone marrow registry
Provide financial support to patients undergoing a bone marrow transplant through our Family Support Program.
Sponsor bone marrow transplant related research in hopes of finding better alternatives for patients faced with a bone marrow transplant

I served as President of the board for its first 9 years. Today, I continue to serve as a director on the board and I am the chair of our fundraising and research sponsorship committees.

Career

My full time job is with Amrock in Detroit, MI where I am a Software Architect. Prior to working at Amrock I worked for Avatar Software Creations in Windsor, ON for 12 years as a Senior Software Developer.

Highway North Interactive

In my free time, I have fun working with two of my close buddies on our company, Highway North Interactive.

At Highway North we create unique websites and mobile applications. We started in 2006 with the launch of TerraClues.

Today, we focus on mobile application development and specialize in the Android platform. JogTracker, our first Android application is one of the top applications in Google Play while our application Andrometer won second place in the Misc/Tools category of the Android Developer Challenge 2.

Technologies

I am a polyglot developer with a particular love for object oriented programming and databases. Here are some technologies and programming languages I am most passionate about: