Oddly enough, I started my professional career as a computational linguist. It was about the only lucrative thing I could do after graduating with a degree in linguistics. I was working for a start-up company named Attensity doing text analytics. As a linguist, my main job was to help develop dictionaries to drive computer software that could parse (break down into parts) English text at very high speeds. As it was a start up, I also got to work a little on the engine itself from a design/requirement side of things.

     As you can imagine, breaking text into its component parts leaves you with a lot of data to manage. Because of the start-up nature of the company, there was a shortage of people doing customer data analysis. This became the responsibility of the linguistics group by default. At the time, there was a small group of us doing most of the dictionary work, and a couple of people doing the data analysis. When the data analysts left the company, that left a vacuum to be filled. I took the challenge and began working primarily with SQL Server.

     After a year and a half of figuring my way through SQL Server 2000 and business intelligence, I got hired by a company named TeleperformanceUSA. They needed developers to develop the database back-ends to the customer service applications they were building. It was a fast paced place with lots of hours and a fair amount of stress. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal.

     Soon, however, I found my way back to Attensity. This time as their database administrator. The majority of the time, I worked on MySQL with a little bit of Teradata and Oracle thrown into the mix. Most of the SQL Server work was done by the guy that had replaced me earlier and was limited to one customer. It was an interesting switch to move to MySQL. Version 5 had just come out with support for triggers and stored procedures, which was nice. But there were still a lot of rough edges.

     In my last few months of my second stint at Attensity, I got to build out a hosting environment for all of the Proofs of Concept. Once again, I was in the fast lane. It was not uncommon to get a set of data from a prospective client and need to turn it around within a week or two. It was fun to build the system to run the POCs efficiently, but soon a friend from the Teleperformance days was calling with another opportunity.

     In January of 2008, I left Attensity and came to work for a company called InnovaSystems International. They’re a small software shop based out of San Diego. The best part of the deal was that they’re a Microsoft shop. This meant that I was back to working with SQL Server. I’ve been on a couple of projects there now, the first on a scale much larger than anything I had done before. It’s a great place to be, and I don’t think I’ll be leaving any time soon.

     While a lot of my work has been in the arena of databases, I’ve still managed to pick up some experience with programming. Doing work with text analytics often required some munging of the text, which was rather effectively done with perl. A pretty solid foundation with that, even though it is a scripting language, helped me to pick up VB 6 at Teleperformance. Since then, most of my experience in actually programming has been doing web sites with PHP, although I have managed to learn a fair bit of C# in the last year or so. I’m not a C# guru mind you, but I know enough to get myself into trouble.