About Me

I am a not-particularly-interesting man, roughly 40 years of age, based in the heart of Philadelphia, Pennyslvania in the United States. I live with my cool fiancée Kate and our two Shetland sheepdogs, Duncan and Jazz. Apropos of nothing, if anyone's in the market for a couple noisy-ass dogs, let me know. They're free!

The three primary interests that have stayed with me throughout my entire life are, in no particular order: the piano, software, and video games.

I'm a classically trained pianist of over three decades and have a degree in piano performance. My favorite composers are Nikolai Medtner, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Kapustin, Arnold Bax, Ludwig van Beethoven, Hiromi Uehara, and Masashi Hamauzu. The complete list of composers I like is...really long.

I compose piano music, these days largely for intermediate-level (give or take) players, which I upload under the pseudonym "Rowan McTavish" to a little YouTube channel. Most of the sheet music from that channel is available for purchase in my Shopify store.

Despite all of this, for the entirety of my adult life, I've been a professional software engineer or software engineering manager, usually in web development. I currently work for a software co-op that does stuff for other co-ops. I like co-ops. Everything should be a co-op.

I don't do a lot of software stuff outside of work, because there are always other things I'd rather be doing. Maybe I'll share one of my rare side-projects here from time to time.

My native language is English. I speak competent, if not entirely fluent, French, and enough Russian to probably not die in Russia (at least not due to the language barrier). My global warming crisis plan is to make my way to one of them real chilly Siberian cities, so I figured it'd be a useful skill. So far, it has not been a useful skill, except for that one time I talked to an Uber driver in Russian and he was super stoked. Usually I just tell my friends things about the language that I think are interesting and then they say "Dave, shut up."

My favorite video games are Celeste, Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, Metroid: Zero Mission, Guild Wars 2, and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII-3 (get over it, loser). My favorite book is Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, because I'm very unique and interesting. Despite author Dan Simmons having been a problematic dude, my followup fave books are those of his Hyperion Cantos.

I like jogging, baking, and a bunch of other stuff, too. This is the most I've ever written about myself. Feels like more than enough. Bye for now.