Stuart Palmer
- Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
- Programming Consultant since 1990
- Founder and President of Silverado Consulting Inc, a Florida Corporation
A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Stuart grew up watching the transformation of the "Valley of Heart's Delight" into "Silicon Valley." His first job at 8 years old was cutting apricots for drying. The agricultural start notwithstanding, Stuart decided to pursue a programming career.
Stuart had a number of summer jobs at early technology companies, including Stanford Technologies (STI), HP Labs, and Convergent Technologies. His first full-time position out of college was with a start-up telecom software development group at NEC America. While his degree concentration and primary interests was in embedded systems, circumstances led him to become an expert in database programming, specifically using Sybase.
Deciding that the full-time employee life was not for him, Stuart became an independent programming contractor. That decision allowed him to program for a variety of companies in widely diverse industries such as bond trading, high stakes auctions, currency trading, insurance, credit card call centers, commercial mortgages, and children's soccer coaching.
Stuart was an early adopter of many technologies, starting with programming for the Mac/Motorola 6802, Xerox PARC GUI, and Convergent UNIX minicomputers in the early/mid-80s. That was followed by object-oriented programming in C++ and SQL programming in relational databases in the late-80s. Stuart helped develop an object-oriented programming platform in the mid-90s that incorporated run-time typing information. That platform abstracted away the tedious work so application programmers could focus on the business requirements, much like Ruby on Rails does today. As such, Stuart has embraced RoR as an amazing framework on which to build database-backed web applications.
After getting married, Stuart and his wife moved to Jacksonville Beach, FL in 2012. He became very involved in the local programming community and has really enjoyed that cameraderie.
Stuart's passions include traveling, dancing, waterskiing, and Sharks hockey.