About Me

I’m Tony Dean.  and from Central Massachusetts. I live in a loft within a 19th century factory building in Worcester, MA.  My first experience with software development began with the Apple IIe computer in 1984 learning Apple Basic with the ProDOS operating system.  The system had 64K of RAM and two floppy drives. I also fooled around with Logo making the turtle draw on the screen.

My undergraduate degree was in Marine Science with a minor in Music.  After I graduated, I spent a year working for Digital Equipment Corporation as a database programmer on PICK OS.  After that, I worked as a technology aid at a middle school in Massachusetts.  At that time, the schools were using mostly the Power Macs running System 7 OS.  Initially the networking was protocol was AppleTalk and migrated to TCP/IP. At the time, Apple had a unique remote management system that allowed remote installations, screen broadcasts and a simplified desktop called At Ease.  

After that, I earned a Masters in Teaching and spent the next 7 years teaching Physical Science and Chemistry at the Middle and High school levels.  In fact, I still teach an introductory chemistry class at the local Community College.

Then in 2005, I made the decision to change careers and went back to school at Boston University College of Engineering’s Late Entry Accelerated Program where I earned a my Master’s in Computer Systems Engineering.  My focuses were on project management and computer performance engineering.  

Since then I’ve worked at mostly larger companies including General Dynamics, Autonomy, Hewlett Packard and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.  Focusing on database design, UI design, QA and performance engineering. I consider myself a seasoned Java, C# and Python developer. Lately I’ve spent a fair amount of time with the Django framework.   

Current Activities

In early 2017, I left the corporate world and started working as a developer for the city I live in.  In this role, I deal primarily with legacy code that was written in the late 80’s to early 90’s where I try to apply newer design techniques to antiquated code with the emphasis on refactoring working code to make it more maintainable.  

In my day job, I mostly working with Genero 4GL language which is an extension of the old IBM Informix business development language.  

Opus? (Not just a penguin)

Opus refers to a work number that is assigned to a musical composition and is an indirect reference to Donald Knuths title “The Art of Computer Programmnng”  In this blog, I hope to share my experiences with the creative challenges in writing code that is well organized, maintainable and self-documenting and of course elegant

Contact

tdean@binaryopus.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdean95