A Little History...

Hi, My name is Derek and I'm from St. Louis, Mo. I have many hobbies but really enjoy building circuits from scratch on breadboards and copper clads. I love all things computer related including security, servers, software development and coding placefiles. I'm a ham radio operator (Extra Class) and love building antennas, transistor amplifiers and communicating worldwide on my HF/VHF/UHF transceivers. I work in the private sector on Howitzers and their optical fire control. Along with many other Military Weapons and Instruments, Thanks to David Wells (RIP). I also really enjoy coding and first started when I was 12 in Microsoft QBasic, with help from a book at the library. QBasic lead me to Visual Basic, then it was on to Delphi and C/C++ to compile standalone applications. I enjoy both Linux & Windows environments and code in both.

In 2006 I started out on GRLevelXStuff with Aaron and Jeff Lake (RIP). I got my start by being the first to create the storm track projection cone via a placefile for GRLevelX. These cone projections were removed from GRLevelX Software (GRTV) after Baron threatened lawsuits so the demand was high but it landed in a gray area of development. So I then formed the website GRLevelXMods and wrote the software GR Manual Storm Tracks which finally provided GRLevelX users with fully customizable storm track projections (Fan, Wedge & Cone) and custom ETA city lists.

In 2008, Eric Wheaton and I then joined forces. He was and still is the best coder I have ever met. He was years ahead of the competition with his placefiles and was the first to sucessfully create County Outline Unions, which was a huge achievement. He has coded for Allisonhouse, MichiganWX (Jeff Lake), GRLevelXMods, UPS and several other companies. Eric has a very unique way of thinking and coding that I still haven't seen in anyone else over the last 25+ years. After all these years, Eric and I are still great friends, still working in the GR community, coding behind the scenes, creating a lot of custom content for other's use without the public credits.