Professional

I am a software developer at Perficient technology consulting in Austin, Texas. Previously I worked at Dell, creating a new search platform for Dell's online presence.

Before Dell, I was a developer on the product team at Telligent building enterprise social collaboration software such as Community Server and Graffiti CMS.

I am very passionate about improving my craft as a developer and my technical knowledge. And I love building awesome applications and platforms with really smart team mates.

Personal

I live in Austin, Texas. I have three adorable girls: my 11 year old stepdaughter Mackenzie, five year old daughter Jillian, and my three year old daughter Cadence. We also have a black Schnauzer puppy named Peyton.

I was born and grew up in Fort Myers, Florida and lived in Florida until 2000. After that I lived in southeastern Pennsylvania and then northern Delaware for a few years. In August 2005 the Harder family took their wagons west and moved to Frisco, Texas, a city just to the north of Dallas. Five years later in 2010, we moved to the great city of Austin.

Past

I went to college at Florida Institute of Technology from 1995 through 1999 majoring in Space Science / Astrophysics, along with some Computer Science classes. I had wanted to be a physicist and astronaut since the third grade, and selected a university and major based upon that. Computer programming was something I did for fun. But with the explosion of the internet at the time, I realized during my junior year that while I love science - especially physics - programming was what I was destined to do. So I jumped into the world of software development without looking back.

I have been writing software for fun since I was a kid, and professionally since college. I started out learning BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20, later replaced by an Atari 800 XL. In high school I progressed to QBASIC in DOS and bought my first programming book with the money I earned from my first part time job. At Florida Tech, I first learned Fortran and then took a few CS classes with Ada. Meanwhile I started learning ColdFusion and building web applications for fun and profit. After a few years of bending Cold Fusion, I started developing with the Microsoft .NET Framework and C# in 2002 and have been primarily using that stack ever since. However I enjoy learning new languages and technologies.

Web Site

I use this site to share my thoughts, projects, and photos with my friends and the public. KevinHarder.com is currently powered by Orchard CMS which runs on the .NET Framework. It is using Windows Server, ASP.NET, and SQL Server.