Tony Rasa

October 6th, 2009

Hi There! My name is Tony Rasa (says so right up there). I have been doing professional development for somewhere around 15 years – I’ve been writing programs and playing with computers for much longer than that. I started out on home computers with 2K of memory and membrane keyboards, then discovered BBSes at 300 baud, eventually ran my own board, and had a great time doing it. Learned a lot in the process as well.

Since that point, I have dabbled in music, system administration, and software consulting. I now work at Blackfin, a software consulting firm based in Boise, Idaho. I do “architect” things there, working with the many project teams to help guide decisions and keep the team’s quality up where it needs to be. I’m an advocate of using new and different approaches where they make sense. I spend time researching different approaches and help develop internal tools that we then redistribute to our clients to help them achieve their goals. I think that a new practice that has too much of a learning curve for practical implementation isn’t very useful, so I look for ways to get people through that learning curve as quickly as possible – training, code samples, anything else to reduce friction.

My current technological studies include C# and the various .NET technologies, employing tools such as nHibernate, LINQ to SQL, Structure Map, Unity, and whatever else catches my attention. I’m also busy learning Python, Ruby, and IronPython/IronRuby, and brushing up on my sadly neglected Java skills.

I’m a huge fan of agile approaches and test driven development, having seen it work in practice. I’m always looking for new ways to manage complexity. I’m not so into some of the less-practical flamewar-worthy topics that these buzzwords generate, such as “what is Agile?” “are you doing SCRUM correctly?” or “that’s not really Test Driven Development! [capital letters, as defined by whatever the author of the last book you read said]“. But I’ll enter such discussions on a strictly recreational benefit :)

If you have questions about stuff, please contact me at trasa_at_meancat.com. I can also be found on facebook, linkedin, and twitter if you’re into that sort of thing.  Since we’re throwing links around, here’s an RSS feed too.  Thanks!

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