As a recent addition to the Forrester Application Development and Delivery (AD&D) team, I thought I’d use my first post here to introduce myself.

I’ve been a professional software developer, in one capacity or another, for the entirety of my professional career. Like many others on this team, I’m a geek (not a nerd; yes, there is a difference) and very interested in anything related to software development, gadgets and especially mobile.

As part of the AD&D team, I’ll be focusing on Mobile development topics alongside my colleagues Jeffrey Hammond and Michael Facemire. Because of my experience with open source software, described below, I will be focusing some of my efforts on that space as well. Currently I’m working on updating some of the existing reports in the Mobile App Dev Playbook, the first of which will be published soon.

Before coming to Forrester, I was a product manager at SAP responsible for part of the SAP Mobile Platform (SMP) SDK. I owned the SMP Hybrid SDK (called Kapsel) and the SAP Fiori Client, a native mobile runtime for SAP Fiori. In the last ten years, I’ve held positions at BlackBerry, BoxTone (now part of Good Technology) and AT&T. While at AT&T, I focused primarily on mobile application platforms, achieving developer certification for several products in this space.

I’m a prolific writer, even though I failed English in High School. I started my personal tech blog more than 6 years ago and haven’t stopped writing since. After leaving BlackBerry, I published the first book on BlackBerry development called BlackBerry Development Fundamentals. About that time, I started writing a series of magazine articles on how to mobilize IBM Lotus Domino applications for The View, a magazine for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Developers and Administrators. The majority of those articles were published into an anthology called Mastering Mobile for Notes/Domino.

For the last 4 years, I’ve been a contributor to the Apache Cordova project, a popular open source framework for cross-platform mobile development. I’ve published 4 books on the topic, my latest are companion books: Apache Cordova 4 Programming and Apache Cordova API Cookbook. Because of my experience in this space, my first Forrester report is on a related topic; the report is called New Tools Make Hybrid Apps A Safer Bet and is available now for reading.

In case you’re interested, my first book was a book for beginning Soccer Referees called What Now? The Essential Guide for New Soccer Referees. I was a professional Soccer Referee for many years and wrote the book to help new Referees understand how to get started.