My name is Dan Lash, I am a software engineer, aspiring chef, and entrepreneur.
A little history:
I grew up in small family in a suburb of the
capital of Michigan... Lansing! While in school I took a great interest in computers and software development. I took
both of my high school's programming courses (which I later TA'ed), competed in two statewide programming competitions, took
programming courses at the local college, and was awarded our school's computer science award after
I sold them a networked "help queue" system for lab-based instruction.
During this time I was also working as an intern at a local branch of Analysts International, helping build an extranet order tracking system for a national
aluminum manufacturer in Python. When the internship ended I worked with a co-worker and a small team to launch an internet startup, StockAlerts.com.
After high school I decided to continue my education at Michigan State University, working toward a bachelors of science
degree in computer science. While attending college I worked as a web developer for a humanities/technology integration research
group at MSU, focusing on low cost solutions with open source software. I also completed several independent consulting projects
for the physics department, and other local entrepreneurs.
Near the end of my undergraduate college experience I started getting interested in Microsoft technologies and subsequently worked for another local
consulting company who primarily built custom software and websites using those technologies. Then in my last semester, my team in the
senior design course at MSU partnered with the peer-to-peer collaboration team at Microsoft. We were charged with creating an easy to use
class library, corresponding gui controls and Visual Studio project types for developing collaboration style (chat) peer-to-peer applications quickly.
It's been a blast!
The future:
Where do I see myself in a year, 5 years, 10 years? I don't know to honest, but one thing I can tell you is that I'm going to be
enjoying what I'm doing.
People always ask about passion, and I have three of them:
Software, food, and money (in that order). I love to learn about, make, and teach everything I can about these subjects. I don't exactly
know what they all have in common, but that's ok. I also love music and a nice long drive every once in a while, and I couldn't
begin to explain why I enjoy those either. The bottom line is, where ever I am in life you can be sure I'm thinking about
one or more of those three things.
