Welcome to the professional home page of Paul J. Ste. Marie. I'm a software engineer in Middletown, Ohio who has worked at a variety of companies.
I was born in Detroit and grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where my father worked at Wright-Patterson AFB. I've always had a strong interest in science and technology. When I was in high school I did a lot of tinkering with electronics and was involved with amateur astronomy. I worked at the Dayton Museum of Natural History and worked with wildlife rescue and rehabilitation as well as teaching summer museum lore classes and giving planetarium shows. I also played trombone and was very active in all the music activities I could find.
I went to college at Caltech, where I majored in astronomy. I did some undergraduate research projects in radio astronomy there, observing the Galactic Center at Owens Valley and Hat Creek. Alas, I burned out in my senior year and left Caltech.
I always did a lot of recreational programming while I was at Caltech, and wound up worked at BDM doing logistics modeling and inventory requirements analysis for the Air Force Logistics Command. I've been in a series of software development jobs since then, working at BDM, BCD Technology, Professional Data Resources, Digineer, and Fifth Third Bank.
I'm a bit of a polyglot when it comes to programming. I started out in C and Fortran, and rapidly moved to C++ when Borland came out with Turbo C++ v1.0. I have done various specialized applications in SLAM, DSSSL, Lex, and Yacc, as well as some work in Pascal. I've also developed a number of software architectures for two and three tier client-server applications that work with a variety of client GUI frameworks. More recently I've been working extensively with web applications written in Java using servlet/JSP/EJB technology.
I'm interested in a variety of tools, especially text markup languages such as SGML and XML and tools for processing them such as DSSSL and XSL. I've worked fairly extensively with Jim Clark's Jade and made some extensions to it while I was consulting at Lexis-Nexis.