My name is Paul Goins. I am an American software engineer living in the Kansai region of Japan. I will be available for employment in the United States from July of 2011. My resume is available upon request.
I started programming in the summer of 1995, shortly after finishing elementary school, and have basically been programming ever since. I was always curious about some of the BASIC programs which were written in my math textbooks but which the class never covered, and also I enjoyed playing games on computers and hoped to someday take that on as a career. So, when a friend introduced me to QBasic, which was freely available and already loaded on my DOS-based 286, I dove in and never looked back.
Basically, through school I worked mostly in QBasic, using one of my projects as a career fair project. I shifted my focus to C and C++ in college, but also picked up Java, C#, ASP.NET, and PL/SQL along the way.
After college, I got a job working for Intel Corporation in DuPont, Washington. I became the maintainer of part of a significant internally used VB.NET-based test application. I worked in a lab environment with pre-release hardware, and wrote many automated tests and programs (using C and Perl) to interface with lab instruments such as Tektronix oscilloscopes and DC power supplies.
I enjoyed my work at Intel, but I chose to leave to pursue a job as an Assistant Language Teacher on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme. I lived in Himeji for two years, teaching in a public high school, and continuing to program in my spare time, focusing on Linux and cross-platform development.
I've since stopped teaching and have returned to professional programming. I've been programming in Osaka for the past 2 and a half years, and plan to return to the US in June of this year.