Gary has long been fascinated with how things work. “When I was a little kid, apparently I was always taking apart the vacuum cleaner,” he says. Raised by a music magazine publisher and a school principal, Gary pursued studies in the creative arts: music, sculpture and painting. In music, he focused on contemporary classical, recognizing that its atonal tendencies can be hard to appreciate. "You have to work at it,” he says with a grin, “like whiskey and cigars."
“Like most musicians,” Gary continues, “I went into the food service industry.” But after settling in Vermont where he baked donuts and ran a pizza place, he decided to bring his art skills into the computer age and learned how to design websites. Then, like with the vacuum cleaner, Gary needed to get into the machine and see how it worked. “I learned when studying sculpture, that you need to maintain your tools,” he says, “with sculpture that’s your chisel, with web design it’s your computer.”
Continuing to build his new toolset, Gary began working for a small retail chain and grew his job responsibilities from website design to information systems management, teaching himself how to build apps for quotes and scheduling. "Programming", he reflects, “is a lot like any other creative endeavor: you have to think creatively, out of the box and, like music, everything’s happening in a time, in a sequence of events.”
Gary was Aerie’s first employee and specializes in business applications development and custom code as well as creative solutions needed to deliver dashboards, web parts, branding and other features for unique environments. “I love problem-solving, figuring things out and building things that move,” he says. “Even if they’re virtual, computer programs have a lot of moving parts. I like the idea that you’re building something that will need to evolve as the client’s needs change.”
