David P Thomas, davidpthomas at gmail.com

Snowboarder. Programmer. Regex Artist. Juggler. Gamer.

Quick About, for the impatient

Hello World. Welcome. fepus is my longtime handle. It means nothing really. Many years ago I received an auto-generated password and 5 of the contiguous string of characters happened to be f.e.p.u.s. I liked it. So here we are. I recently had a .plan. Well, I still do have a “plan”, but the nature of blogging online is much easier and seemingly more mainstream than /usr/bin/finger, so Wordpress to the rescue. I am a certified snowboard instructor (Whistler, B.C.) stuck inside the body of a programmer living in Santa Cruz, CA. Regex is really fun. I’ve been juggling for 10 years and playing video games even longer.

Some Background

I have been living and working in downtown Santa Cruz, CA since May 1st, 2006. Previously, I was living and working in downtown Chicago for 12 years. My alma-mater is the Illinois Institute of Technology circa ‘93-97. While there, I studied molecular biology in the lab of Mark Garfinkel for 3+ years and my heart found a place here. In 1997, I accepted a research fellowship in Michael Young’s Biological Timing Genetics Lab at Rockefeller University in Manhattan. Thereafter, I took an unexpectedly long, but planned, hiatus from molecular biology and mathematics to focus on computer science (for interdisciplinary purposes). I’ve spent the last 10 years as an programmer working on projects such as orbitz.com, ny1.com, newhomenetwork.com, cars.com, and vraagenaanbod.nl (translates to ’supply and demand’ in Dutch). I just left a lifestyle as a senior software engineer (4.5 years) at orbitz.com, now owned by the travel giant Cendant. Now I work for AccuRev, a leader in the software configuration management tool space.

While I truely enjoy my work, I constantly think about snowboarding, inline skating, and juggling. I am a numbers juggler doing both 5-ball (~3minutes max) and 7-ball (84 catch record). I’m one of very few that inline-skate Chicago Critical Mass. In June 2004, I went to Canada’s Whistler-Blackcomb to attend summer freestyle snowboard camp on Horstman glacier. Check out my freestyle highlights! Six months later, in December 2004, I went back to Whistler for 4 weeks to get my level 1 CASI Snowboard Instructor Certification. I like to think I’m working to save for a lifetime supply of lift tickets.

My heart is in the command line. I dream about ViM. I believe in free software. Bash completion rules. 95+ WPM, homerow. If Bono could c0d3, he’d choose Ruby. Unit test or don’t program. The mouse slows me down. I use wmii for my window manager. SCM is fascinating. I’ve since graduated beyond CVS and now use AccuRev and Subversion extensively. Java r00lz… But not all the time. Sucks that dvorak isn’t unix friendly.

Some Ancient History

Someone recently found my very first web page. I thought it was dead. Kinda fun to look back. Animated gifs. haha. Check out my programming endeavors back in the day.

I hope you find something useful here… dave

:wq