My name is Steve Saxon, and I'm a geek. If there was a Twelve-Step Program for geeks I'd be on it.

It all started, dare I say, almost 30 years ago when I was really into electronics. My school got a Research Machines 380Z and I was hooked. I went from that CP/M based clunker to an Atari 600, worked on some games on the Amstrad CPC464. I also wrote apps on the BBC Micro and Commodore Pet.

Still, it wasn't until I got my first PC at the end of 1988 that things picked up. I taught myself C (to get away from all the 6502 assembler I'd been writing) and started developing DOS-based apps. I started tinkering with Windows 2.0 then writing small apps in Windows 3.0. From there I got on the beta for Windows 3.1 and bought a C++ compiler. After a year playing with C++ out of hours, I convinced someone to give me a job doing that, and went from there.

After 6 years honing my craft both at work, and writing shareware on my own time, I went to Dell. They wanted someone who knew XML (in 1998!), and lucky for me I'd written an XML parser to share data between my shareware apps. After getting the job I built the XML-based scripting language used to build every page on Dell.com globally and helped define the XML schemas still used to define Dell.com's content today.

The perf on that scripting language wasn't all that, so in December 2000 I led the port of that system to ASP.NET, building a platform on top of ASP.NET called Storm that is still the basis of all of the Dell.com online applications.

Somewhere in there I got really into Macs. I guess Apple is the anti-Dell. I got quite into Objective C and Cocoa programming, which I liked because it made me think different (no pun intended). I wrote some shareware apps just so I had specific projects I could target. It turned out though, that I wasn't a very good Cocoa programmer, and I found I couldn't fix most of the issues that were reported. I just had no idea what caused them, which was quite humbling. The source code is out there for any enterprising type that wants to take it on.

I left Dell after 7 years to join a Microsoft Partner called Neudesic, which rather crazily is growing at over 300% a year.

I live in Phoenix, Arizona (yes, its a dry heat) and gave up my V8 to drive a Honda Civic because Arizona doesn't need any more global warming.

I guess you could say this site is dedicated to the things I care about outside of work, or that help to lift my day.

Sometimes I'll rant, but I'm usually an upbeat kinda guy, so you won't see much of that.

Tweed is the name of the engine I developed which drives this site.

I'm a busy kind of guy. I started out maintaining this site in Blogger, but it became quite unstable after Google bought them.

I moved to using Community Server. Originally I was thinking it would be a good home for the discussions on the shareware stuff. However, it turned out to be too time-consuming to get in to create blog posts. By the time I got as far as the entry screen, the energy had fizzled.

I got quite a few complaints about not having updated for several months. Around this time, I discovered Twitter. It was at MIX 07, and at first it seemed like a pile of nonsense. But then it occured to me that maybe this was the answer to my blog posting dilemma. With Twitter, I could text my posts in.

Of course, you can't make an interesting blog with 140 characters, so I introduced simple BBCode support so I could easily embed YouTube vids, links to products on Amazon, images and the like.

If you want to see the raw feed before I clean it up, you can see it here: http://twitter.com/xmlguy

Once I had the basic site up, I added in Comment support. I used ReCAPTCHA to block smambots, and because I like the premise of that project.

The name Tweed is a derived from Twitter and Feed. The site syndicates the RSS Feed of my posts from Twitter. It then stores them in a database for "posterity", and so I can cross-reference them to the comments.