I’m an IT consultant and contract programmer (Murray and Waker, Inc is my consulting company). My first computing job (which I had for 10 years) was computing support for the High Energy Particle Physics department at the University of Pennsylvania. So when I discovered Software Carpentry and started volunteering, it was like returning to my roots. I’ve actually taught at some bootcamps already, but I wanted to get more background on the teaching philosophy parts and so signed up for the class. I’m a core contributor on the Python project (CPython), where I am in particular maintainer of the email related packages in the standard library, as well as trying to improve our project workflow support (core-workflow@python.org). In my programming career after UofP I’ve done web development, worked on the high-availablity infrastructure for a VOIP provider, and done work on the backend that powers the Blackberry BB10 social media integration (mostly the email component, for obvious reasons), among other things. But Science has always been a love of mine, so I’m thrilled to be able to contribute my skills to helping scientists do their work better.