Anne Truitt Zelenka

I’m going to take another self-indulgent moment as I continue to populate the Who Is Anne list in my sidebar. Doing it this way, by making a Blogger post, means that my bio area will always be formatted just like the rest of the site. This is the beauty of content management, a beauty I didn’t recognize until Blogger ate my first template.

I’m a computer programmer, and I have been since I was maybe 13. That’s when my dad bought our family an Apple II and I drew horses out of big blocks on the screen using BASIC. I didn’t think to major in computer science when I attended Stanford as an undergrad. I was too fascinated by other subjects and the CS students seemed very geeky. I hadn’t gotten in touch with my inner geek at that point. Instead, I studied economics and philosophy but soon after graduating realized I wanted to work as an engineer, specifically a software engineer. I went back to Stanford for a master’s in statistics, that being the quickest route to techie cred. I squeezed in as many CS classes as I could while taking hairy theoretical statistics classes with doctoral students from Russia and China.

From there, I spent eight years at three different software companies: first a defense contractor, where I discovered the joys of SBIRs and IRAD projects, then a start-up doing natural hazard risk analysis software with some coworkers from that defense contractor, and finally, Oracle, building financial applications. At Oracle, I led a team of thirteen in rearchitecting the customer model so it worked for both the customer relationship management and the enterprise resource planning apps. It was a blast.

Once I had my second child, I needed a break and my kids needed more of me, so I’ve taken the last five years off from paid work. I had yet another child (that makes three) and in 2004 agreed to move with my husband to Maui when he was offered an exciting job transfer. I started blogging as The Barely Attentive Mother in summer 2004 and gradually rediscovered my true geek nature. Now I’m ready to return to the tech workforce. I’m refreshing my skills with classes and projects, focusing on Web 2.0 technologies. We plan to move to Colorado in 2006 at which time I look forward to my second chance at working professionally as a technologist.

I’m currently focused on XHTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python, RSS and other syndication feed formats, XML, PHP, and MySQL. I am easy when it comes to languages and tools: I don’t get fixated on one or another because I love to learn new things. In the past I’ve successfully used everything from UNIX/C++ to Oracle with PL/SQL and Windows/ASP. I have a few personal programming projects I’m working on. They are so exciting I don’t know whether or when I’ll be able to rip myself away from them in order to get paid to do what other people think is important. I’m having a hell of a great time. So glad to be back.