About Sam
Sam Schroeder is a professional software developer who shares a 93 year-old bungalow in SW Minneapolis with his wife, two girls, two beagles, and a maniacal cat.
I am my own one man show called Proton Microsystems, LLC. I mainly do Ruby on Rails consulting and development but will entertain any offers for Progress/WebSpeed work.
My current interests include:
- Ruby and Rails
- Software Development Management (how NOT to document to death)
- Test & Behaviour Driven Development (how to do it properly)
- Patterns (less but better code)
- CSS and JavaScript UI development
I first programmed professionally in 1996. I wrote an application to help manage the flow of clothing through an industrial laundry. Exciting, I know. Two of my all-time-favorite programs I wrote in BASIC on an Apple IIc when I was 8. The first one was a catalog of my Transformers, all 15 of them, and the second was a small Choose Your Own Adventure story. It was a blatant rip-off of the movie Aliens.
I grew up in Cherokee, Iowa, a typical, small, rural Midwestern town and attended Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, not in Ithaca, New York. I double majored in Fine Art and Computer Science. People used to ask me why I chose such unrelated majors. My response was “One for love and one for food”. However, I think they appealed to me as both are concerned with making things and it’s that process of creation which drives me. Sometimes I find the process more interesting then the final product.
After Cornell I moved to Boston, with my fiancé, Bridget, to work as a consultant for Progress Software. I also started a Master’s program at Harvard University, which I never finished. We got a cat, Parker, from the Humane Society who loves to bite me. I have scars. We only lived in Massachusetts for 11 months as we moved to Nashua, New Hampshire. “Living free or dying” in NH was a fun time for us as we lived less then two hours from the White Mountains or from the ocean. Looking back it was too bad we were only there for a year before we moved to Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
Wow, this is getting long. I’ll be less verbose.
Bridget and I were married the summer before we moved to MN. While here we’ve had two girls, Abby and Cate, bought a town home, then upgraded to our bungalow in the city, got a few beagles, Barney & Thelma. I’ve also worked for three different companies in that time.
Contact: samuelschroeder [at] gmail [dot] com
