My name is Charles Feduke and I'm a software developer. I'm also an avid war gamer and painting hobbyist, I love history, and I'm studying anthropology when I'm not busy keeping abreast of the latest and greatest in the software world.
I grew up in Binghamton, New York and spent a couple years living on my own and working full time under less than ideal conditions (read: not programming). My teen years were gainfully spent learning how to program after my friend David introduced me to the Internet via the [at the time] ubiquitous America Online. Before graduating high school I left for the Marine Corps where boot camp and a correspondence course finished out the requirements necessary to get my diploma. I spent some time out in Twentynine Palms where I learned some Ada 95 and how to love the desert. The majority of my enlistment was aboard MCB Quantico, Virginia, where I left as a sergeant. Upon getting out I worked for a number of government contracting companies and finally ended up at a commercial startup where I am performing some of the most interesting programming of my career. I presently reside in Fredericksburg, Virginia where I'm surrounded by enough Civil War to keep me busy for some time to come.
My programming odyssey began with Microsoft's Visual Basic 3.0 and ANSI C using Borland's C compiler for Windows. I had a short lived relationship with Turbo Pascal for Windows, which I learned as part of a high school programming course and used to write dynamic link libraries to increase the functionality available to VB3. As the years went by I upgraded with time through VB5 and 6, but picked up on the other core elements necessary for most programming gigs; HTML, CSS, and Javascript, the most despised PHP, and of course the write once read never Perl. I began working with something other than flat file databases while in the Marine Corps, using Microsoft's Visual FoxPro, Access, and eventually SQL Server 7 and Oracle 8i. I turned my Ada programming syntax knowledge loose in Oracle's stored procs, because, well its Ada, and to this day I still prefer PL/SQL syntax over T-SQL. Through the years I have dabbled in C++ (on Linux, and especially with KDE/Qt; on Windows with MFC and ATL), Java, Delphi, Unix shell scripts, and more recently, Ruby, Erlang, and Objective-C. The language I have written the most in is of course C# which I began studying as soon as the first .NET beta was available. I was an expert in the 16-bit Windows API and later fairly well versed in the Win32 API. I have developed Unix daemons, Windows services, old style Windows 3.1 forms applications, newer .NET Fx WinForms apps, web applications and services, console utilities, and even some .NET compact framework applications for the PocketPC. Lately my interests have become Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and virtualization through Windows Server 2008 HyperV (one day maybe I'll get my hands into Windows Presentation Foundation). I plan to do a bit of iPhone 2.0 3.0 development in the near future not just to say I've done it, but also because it just looks like fun.
Also I hate to drive.
