About Me

I started writing software in Basic on a Commodore 64. My first programs were particularly bad text adventure games and you should not judge me for this. Later, I honed my technical skills by teasing every bit of performance out of MS-DOS in order to play computer games. This downward spiral continued into high school, where I was exposed to Linux and became very proficient at installing it, mostly because I kept breaking things and it was faster to start over instead of recompiling the kernel. After high school I pursued a career in computer network administration for a short time, but decided that drop ceilings and crawl spaces were demotivating working environments. I decided to try programming instead, wrote a lot of spaghetti code, nursed my hubris, and managed to convince someone to hire me because I could “do this web stuff”. For over a decade I’ve worked hard to turn these skills into a career. I have developed solutions on both Linux and Windows platforms with JavaScript, C#, Ruby, and PHP. I have extensive experience with web technologies, web services, and desktop development. I’ve used more open source libraries than you can shake a stick at and have even contributed to a few as well. I am the founding member of the St. Louis ALT .NET user group, speak at a variety of user groups and conferences, and write ebooks, technical articles, and blog posts in my spare time. I have been a volunteer mentor, teaching fellow, and instructor for LaunchCode STL. I have a real passion for deconstructing business problems, creating abstract, reusable and flexible solutions, and creating awesome software that rocks. I am an INTP.

Open source contributions

External Articles

Books

Nicholas Cloud is an APress Author

User Group Presentations

Conference Presentations

Tutorials

Additional points of interest

StackOverflow Points

profile for Nicholas Cloud at Stack Overflow, Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers