This is the personal web site of Dale Brayden.
I started the site in 2002 because I wanted my own wiki. I started using TWiki in 1999 while working at SDI, a small company in Vancouver, WA. We used TWiki internally for documentation and project collaboration (because walking the ten feet between offices would have been so last year). I was hooked almost immediately.
I use the site as a notebook. There are lots of links, a reading list, a few pages of original content, a TWiki skin that I wrote in 2003, and a TWiki plugin, also from 2003.
I am married to an amazing woman named Joanne.
Until May of 2006 We had a sweet old dog, a 14 year old Akita / German Shephard mix named Imoto. More recently we adopted two Shiba Inu named Yuki and Mochi.
We recently moved to Seattle after a nearly four year stint in Minnesota.
I am a software developer with many years of successful experience primarily in the area of manufacturing automation.
Years ago I worked for Tektronix, developing manufacturing support systems for their semiconductor manufacturing operations. After several years I made the mistake of moving to the Tektronix's Computer Aided Engineering division. After a few weeks I concluded that Tektronix CAE was destined for the scrap-heap. Tektronix concluded the same thing a year later. In the meantime I left the company to work as an independent contractor.
Contracting was mostly a positive experience: lots of small, 2 to 12 month projects; technical variety; and exposure to basic business operation.
After 4 years of contracting I had the opportunity to work full-time for a startup, Systematic Designs (SDI), that had obtained the contract to develop a large automation system for a semiconductor fab in Tsukuba, Japan. I wound up staying with the company for nearly 13 years, except for about 16 months in the middle when I went to work for an even smaller startup.
The SDI experience was positive. Not very financially rewarding, but worthwhile. Most of our work was in Asia, in Japan and Taiwan, and just a little in Korea. I figure I traveled to Japan 30 times, for periods of a few days up to 6 weeks. In all I've spent nearly 2 years in Japan, most of it in the Tokyo area. I also traveled once to Milan, and all over the United States from Los Angeles to Texas to Boston.
SDI was hit pretty hard by the downturn in the semiconductor industry. That, coupled with the fact the company owner moved most of his operation to Taiwan to save on labor costs, led to the virtual disbandment of the USA side of the company. I left in November 2003.
About 2 weeks later I received a job offer from Guidant Corporation, a manufacturer of implantable medical devices. I had worked with Guidant on a project while I was at SDi, and I had a lot of respect for the company culture, ethics, people, and competencies. I accepted the offer, gladly.
For about three and a half years I developed manufacturing systems for Guidant's Cardiac Rhythm Management division.
Then in mid 2007 I was given an amazing opportunity to work as a software developer at Amazon.com. I joined Amazon at the end of August, 2007. I'm pretty excited to be there - lots of incredibly smart and capable people, massive scale, and Amazon is setting out to solve really big problems. Besides the job, I'm pretty thrilled to be living in Seattle.
My Resumé has a partial list of projects. I've found that working for a company means spending lots of time and effort on projects that aren't very interesting or significant in the long-term. But occasionally it's possible to do something worthwhile. The projects I'm most happy about were:
Since I mentioned my two earlier statechart-related tools, I may as well mention the latest. I recently built a tool that takes a statechart description, written in xml, and produces source code that implements the state machine. It was fantastically easy to do this - about an afternoon. I had immediate need for such a tool because I had a non-trivial state machine that needed to be made even more non-trivial. The tool made this a very straight-forward and error-free process.
Interestingly, a few weeks after I built this tool, I ran across State Chart XML, a specification at W3C to define an xml syntax and semantics for defining statecharts. The syntax was about 80% identical to the one I had come up with, and the semantics was closer to 90%.
Recently, I've been (re)learning Spanish. I studied Spanish in high school, enough that I was able to test out of the University 2-year language requirement. Growing up in Tucson, AZ I had plenty of opportunity to speak and read Spanish, but after I moved to the Pacific Northwest I stopped using the language. I decided recently that I should get back up to speed.
I've been teaching myself to play the piano. Actually, for a couple months I haven't practiced, but come autumn I should have more time and motivation to get back to it. Having played the guitar since I was a boy, the piano is a little challenging. Getting left hand and right hand to do their things independently has been ... interesting. So far I've learned to play Bach's Prelude in C fairly well, and I can stumble my way painfully through most of Beethoven's Minuet in G.
I read quite a lot. My wife and I take good advantage of our local library. When we moved from Vancouver to Minnesota we sold and gave away nearly 2000 books. Since then we've limited our book purchases to technical (computer) and other reference books. The library is also a great source of magazines and journals. We go every week, so I can keep up with the latest issues of The Nation and The New York Review of Books, among others.
We're getting back into the swing of things here in the northwest. We've never lived in Seattle before, but we've visited many times over the years, and already it is beginning to feel like home. We're getting out every weekend to see the city and the countryside.
Other than that, I spend time at home surfing the web, walking the dogs, watching TV, and writing little bits o' ruby code.
