I'm Stephen Ripley, author of this blog, and pretty much the only person that does anything on this blog, not counting my three muses: my family, technology and food. This is "Technology, Food, and Ramblings" where I'll drone on about technology, food, and the more than frequent occurence when the two intersect.

Food First

I was born on Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh, PA. For the Yinzers out there, my first dwelling, besides my mother’s womb, was an apartment complex right on Grandview Ave. overlooking downtown Pittsburgh. For the old-time Yinzers who remember, the apartment was above Petraglia’s Restaurant, owned by my grandparents. Like scads of other Italian-Americans, I grew up around amazing food, most of it cooked by my grandmother. My grandparents used to refer to me as the little gourmet because of my willingness to eat pretty much anything in front of me.

The Computer Era

Flash forward to 6th grade, still in Pennsylvania. 2 or 3 brand new Apple IIs were waiting in our classroom. These were the Apple II+ boxes with the first version of Applesoft BASIC that supported floating point numbers. God bless the soul of my 6th grade math teacher who tried to teach us basic BASIC.

My first computer at home was a Commodore VIC-20 with a whopping 5K of RAM and external cassette dataset. I wanted the VIC-64 but sales of the VIC-20 were falling fast after the introduction of the VIC-64 so the old man picked it up on the cheap.

And College

College was a mixed bag of bouncing around majors: German and toying with majoring in comp sci. We had to compile our C++ programs on a VAX machine running a UNIX emulator. I think HelloWorld might have taken 30 seconds to compile. Thank God for CodeWarrior and my friend’s Quadra 840AV. After returning from an exchange program in Switzerland to improve my German (not a good place to learn German) and several years in front of me at school still, I opted to enroll in the California Culinary Academy. I had always cooked in kitchens during high school and college for extra money and I loved to eat. I enrolled in the California Culinary Academy, moved to the city (San Francisco is the only “city” on the west coast) and within 3 months, landed a job at Zuni Cafe. I eventually went on to finish my degree in Economics at USF.

College Doesn't Last Forever

After completing Culinary Academy, I remained at Zuni and in 1994 I became one of the two sous chefs. Shortly thereafter, I starting to get the itch to be in the world of software and ultimately decided to leave my job. In 1996 and within a few months after leaving Zuni, I started working at OMIX, a software consulting company, and quickly starting working with Java 1.0--leaked memory like a sieve--and a proprietary web-based e-commerce systems. Our work to handle state management was for naught after Netscape introduced cookies in 1997.

From Omix, I went on to another start-up, followed by a stint at Wells Fargo during the technology employment depression after the dotcom bust, and until recently at another start-up (MyNewPlace). MyNewPlace was acquired by RealPage (NASDAQ: RP) in the summer of 2011.

At some point, I decided that I was a better manager than a software developer and have spent over 1/2 of my career leading teams of engineers although, luckily, the roles usually have been fairly hands-on. Having worked for the last year in a role where getting my hands dirty was not possible, I realize how much I enjoy a hybrid role that combines hands-on development and management responsibilities.

If you are interested in a more in-depth overview of my work experience, you’ll find my resume here.