Books

Though it’s been a lifelong goal to be a novelist, I’ve been in technology for most of my life (and still am). I love technology, and have been blessed to be able to write about it for my current employer, Liferay. Here’s a list of everything I’ve published:

My novel, Providence

Providence is my first novel.

Two coasts, two tragedies. A car accident in the east sends the lives of multiple unrelated people in different directions, some of them on collision courses. A school shooting in the west takes some lives and saves others. What are we to make of all this? Is life just a series of meaningless, unrelated events, or is reality following a plan? A teacher, plumber, librarian, student, deadbeat, and others learn the answer to this and more during the course of a single, roller coaster of a day.

Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Kobo.

Liferay in Action

Liferay in Action is a complete guide to developing your website on Liferay Portal. I published this with Manning, and it was a fantastic experience.

Available direct from Manning, at Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

Using Liferay Portal

Using Liferay Portal was created by my team at Liferay. It covers an old version of Liferay. This material is all online now and updated to the latest releases. You can still get this book direct from Lulu or from Amazon.

In parallel with developing this new writing methodology, I started to notice new patterns in myself that I did not like. I was becoming much more easily distractable. I found it harder to concentrate on any given task, and it felt like my productivity was going down. I began to have days that would end and I would scratch my head and wonder, what did I do all day?

To reiterate: to gain all the benefits of switching to a Git-based editorial process, my team would have to switch to a plain text format. We were now going right back to where Professor Provine had pointed me.

My blindness to the difference between creating at the keyboard and formatting a document came from all the business writing I was doing. In 1997, I’d made a career change from server administration to software development. I’d begun coding, first on Lotus Notes platforms, and then on Java. By the turn of the century I’d switched jobs and was lead developer at a Fortune 500 company. One of my first assignments was writing an RFP, or Request for Proposal.

Books I Have Written

Books