Linux is a very fast-growing platform for software development developed by a team of professionals and volunteers coordinated over the internet via the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Its open source licensing allows a very high degree of customization to be performed when adopting it, and its wide hardware support allows it to be used as a common platform across a variety of systems.

I have extensive experience in the development of linux-hosted Applications and User Environments, and have been both a long-time desktop user of Linux/KDE and an administrator of Linux systems in many production roles.

Microsoft Windows is probably the most widely deployed Operating System on end-user desktop systems, and as such has a great deal of momentum as a platform for new applications targetted at this market. I have development experience with low-level protcol implementation and graphical applications on windows environments.

John Deere uses a compact custom OS kernel in its embedded controller applications. This custom operating system is able to deliver extremely high speed and low overhead operation for the specialized applications in which it is used. I have developed control systems on this platform for the 8000 tracks steering and AutoSteer programs

I have extensive experience in C-based development, from courses I have taken and from work with the Linux Kernel, XFree86 fontconfig library, and JDOS-based embedded development.

Though ANSI C is one of the oldest language still in common use, it has aged extremely well due largely to it's simplicity, efficiency, and forward-thinking design. Though it is beginning to be replaced in higher-level design work by C++, there are still many applications (particularly embedded environments) for which the complexity of C++ imposes unreasonable verification difficulties.

The K Desktop Environment was among the first large opensource projects to embrace C++ and object-oriented design. This approach has paid off handsomely over the years as the clean and maintainable codebase it allowed has grown into a mature and full-featured desktop used by millions of people as their primary desktop