About Me

Name: Frank Weindel
Education: B.S. Computer Science, Drexel University
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Hobbies: Creating, Guitar, Asian languages

"Here's to the crazy ones..." One of the things that excites me the most in life is building things. Not just whatever I can get away with. Quality things that make life easier and more fun for others. When I develop software, I think of who is going to use it, how they are going to use it and how they could get the most out of it. I get great joy out of others using what I've made and hearing what they have to say about it.

My programming experience has been quite broad. I've done about a little of everything. I started out in QBasic, eventually moving over to Visual Basic. When the performance of VB was not cutting it for me (see 3DMM Pencil++) I moved on to C/C++ learning much about building native Win32 applications. All the while I taught myself web development with HTML, PHP and MySQL databases. Over one summer, I taught myself a good bit of x86 assembly from a book. In college, I did many a projects in Java. One of my favorite projects in college was building simple microprocessor in VHDL.

In my senior year of college, I became excited about mobile development, specifically iPhone. As part of my senior project, DistroWhale, I built my first set of published iOS applications which were well received by both stakeholders and end-users. My team and I did a great job and we took first place in our major's senior design competition.

Currently, I work on the mainframe operating system MCP for Unisys. I spend a lot of my time there writing in flavors of Algol, a language that predates C. It can be a bit grueling at times but the work is challenging and I couldn't possibly work with better people.

A Short History (if you feel so inclined)

My first experiences with a computer were at my grandfather's neighbor's place back when I was about 5. They had an old Gateway PC with the classic game Wolfenstein 3D, which I was fascinated with. My first computer came in around 1st grade of elementary school. A Packard Bell all-in-one machine with 16mb RAM, Intel 486 processor, and Windows 3.1.'

About 3 years later, my cousin Rich came over to visit one day. He was taking a programming course in QBasic in high school. He showed me a text-based computer game that he wrote for class. I was really intrigued that one person could build something like that. I wanted to learn more. I spent a lot of time looking through his source code and trying to figure out how it worked. When Rich was done with the class, he "lent" me his text book to go through. I still have that to this day.