About Me
My name is Paul Goins. I am a 25 year old American living in Japan and am a software engineer by profession. I will be available for employment as of August 2008. My resume is available for viewing.
I started programming back during the summer after I finished elementary school. I was always curious about some of the BASIC programs which were written in my math textbooks but which the class never covered, and also I enjoyed playing games on computers and hoped to someday take that on as a career. So, when a friend introduced me to QBasic, which was freely available and already loaded on my DOS-based 286, I dove in.
Since then, I've continued to work on my skills. I focused on QBasic throughout junior high school and also began to work with HTML and JavaScript. I made my first graphical game in QBasic and presented it as a 9th grade career fair project. I then turned my focus to C/C++ once I got into college, and continued to develop my skills in my spare time while my school was teaching me Java, C#, ASP.NET, PL/SQL, and other technologies.
My first and currently only professional job as a software engineer was at Intel Corporation in DuPont, Washington. I became the maintainer of part of a significant internally used VB.NET-based test application. I worked in a lab environment with pre-release hardware, and wrote many automated tests and programs (using C and Perl) to interface with lab instruments such as Tektronix oscilloscopes and DC power supplies. I enjoyed my work at Intel, but I chose to leave, at least temporarily, to pursue what I am doing now.
Currently I am a participant in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, working as an Assistant Language Teacher for a public high school. I live in Himeji, Japan, and my apartment is a roughly 30 minute walk from Himeji Castle. I am enjoying life here but am looking forward to returning to my career in software development, either here in Japan or back in the United States.