Darrin J. Sharp
Ever since he was a kid, Darrin has enjoyed figuring out how things work and making them work better. Today, he is a software engineer with years of experience in a wide variety of industries and technologies.
Darrin loves to learn and has always done well in school (he is especially good at standardized tests!). This penchant for learning led to his earning both a B.S. and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois.
After his degrees from the U of I, Darrin took Horace Greeley’s advice to “go west, young man,” and traveled overland in his Ford hatchback to Fort Collins, Colorado. Unfortunately, he sighted no bison on this particular journey, but did easily locate the plant of his new employer, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP).
While working at HP, Darrin wrote code, tested code, and built and delivered code, all in support of HP’s high-performance graphics workstations. In addition, despite his near total lack of hand-eye coordination, Darrin played on several company softball and basketball teams.
While still at HP, Darrin just couldn’t stay out of the classroom, so he pursued a degree in ecology at Colorado State University. He’d always had an interest in the natural sciences, so ecology seemed like a good fit. Since he was working almost full-time at HP while studying, the pursuit of this degree spanned a number of years. Eventually, the university tired of him hanging around campus and awarded him an M.S. through the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology so he’d leave.
After he left HP, Darrin wanted to combine his extensive software skills with his new Ecology degree. This led to a position at MWH Global where he and his team developed a general ecosystem software model. From MWH, Darrin took a position at Riverside Technology, Inc., where he worked on a software model (complete with inline comments from the 1970’s) used by the National Weather Service to predict river flows. Soon after, Microsoft Corp., snapped him up and tasked him with ensuring the quality of a key image processing pipeline used in Microsoft’s geospatial product, Bing Maps (nobody asked him about the name “Bing”). Letting no grass grow under his feet, Darrin looked West again and landed a position at the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI). At OCCRI, he did a little bit of everything, from system administration, to scientific programming, to giving presentations about his research. Back in Fort Collins, Darrin indulged his passions for photography and software engineering at Snapfish LLC, where he was a Software Tools engineer working on improving Snapfish’s photo-personalization products. Most recently, Darrin was a Software Engineer at Spire Global in Boulder, CO supporting development of a high precision weather model using Spire’s proprietary stream of atmospheric data collected from Spire’s own constellation of nano-satellites.
In his spare time, Darrin enjoys public speaking (he gave an Ignite speech to over 400 people on “The Myth of Multitasking”), DJ’ing community radio, riding his bike, volunteering at non-profits, and writing about himself in the third person.
darrin@darrinmail.com (970) 219-6713
https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrinjsharp