About Me
Hi, I’m Nate. I’m a geek.
Computers are and have always been an integral part of my life. As a child, I drew computers on old cardboard boxes, and played with them more than the toys my parents bought me. I’ve always been amazed by these seemingly magical boxes, and how the right incantations of software could get them to do what I told them to. I suppose in retrospect it’s natural that I became a software developer. Even today that fascination remains, except that now computers are slightly more science than magic — and I use real ones instead of making them out of cardboard.
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset. When I go into a store or a restaurant, I analyze the way they do business and how they could improve. When I see advertisements, I try to understand the thought process behind them. It’s not something I do intentionally, it’s just in my nature. As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to run my own company. In 2009, my wife and I decided to take the plunge and launch Zen, a lean project management service. The company was acquired by Rally Software in March of 2010, and Niki and I are now continuing to build Zen under the Rally banner.
I’m also very interested in open source software and how it can be applied to commercial enterprises. I’m the author of Ninject, an open-source dependency injection framework for .NET applications, and the co-founder of Ideavine, a community focused on supplying hosting and assistance to open source projects for the .NET platform.
My hometown of Akron is a medium-sized Midwestern city in northeast Ohio known for only two things: being the former capital of the rubber industry and the birthplace of LeBron James. I spent the first 27 years of my life living within the same 40 mile radius, but after our startup was acquired, we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina to work at Rally’s east coast office. Life in the Triangle is great. The food is particularly good.
I married my high school sweetheart, Nicole, in June of 2006. (She’s the cute blonde in the above picture, if you were wondering. She’s a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Akron, studying Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Basically, that means that we don’t understand a thing about what each other does at work. She completed her MA in the summer of 2007, which I think means I legally have to refer to her as "master".
Along with technology, I’m also very interested in music, in all of its forms. I have an extremely wide breadth of musical interests, ranging from classical to classic rock, Motown to vocal trance, and drum and bass to pop-punk. (Oddly enough, I hate describing music with genres, in spite of the fact that I just listed half a dozen of them!) I’ve been involved in the use of the Internet for musical distribution since the early goings, running an Internet radio station back when you could do so without the RIAA suing your pants off. I’ve never learned to play an instrument, so I think I compensate by learning the lyrics to Dire Straits‘ Down to the Waterline backwards and forwards instead. I’m also a self-diagnosed professional football fanatic, and as a die-hard Cleveland Browns fan, I’m a hopeless glutton for punishment.
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