If you’ve landed here and you’re actually curious about the professional side of me, read on. Despite my demeanor, I’m actually a passionate worker, and I love putting my skills to the test. No, seriously.

Feel free to check out my resume and my professional profile to get a better idea of what “Frank, the employee” is like. I’m loyal, hard-working, and dedicated to my craft—whatever that craft may be.

In brief, I’ve had an interesting go at the professional world thus far. First and foremost, it all started with a stint at the University of Waterloo. All my initial post-secondary plans changed when I got the fabled “You’re In!” package from Waterloo. After all, this was the school consistently ranked as one of and oftentimes the best in the country.

I began as a Computer Science major, but decided after a year that I didn’t like where my co-operative education jobs were taking me. I opted for a computer science minor, maintaining my knowledge and credits, and then switched into a program to follow my other passion: writing.

As I pursued my CS degree, I began a co-op job turned full-time gig working for the Toronto District School Board. In my early days at the TDSB, I worked as a Flash developer for the Ontario E-Learning program. After about a year, I moved into a role as an application developer for the IT department where I worked on developing a large-scale project involving SharePoint 2007, which at the time was still the new beast on the block. C#, Oracle, and .NET were my bread and butter.

When it was all said and done, I ended up with a BA in Rhetoric and Professional Writing with studies in Computer Science. This degree, which should by all accounts be a handicap, has allowed me to occupy both developer positions given my wealth of experience in various technologies and writerly positions. Too bad print is dead; I would’ve loved a job behind a rag pen.

With school coming to a close, I took a job as an assistant editor for Ars Technica, Condé Nast’s well-respected tech news authority, which turned out to be a day-in, day-out gig which had me delving deep into the beating heart of the game industry. I greatly enjoyed my job there, and I was quite sad to leave.

In my time working with games, I’ve done a wide variety of different writing. I’ve done blog posts, news articles, feature articles, opinion pieces, and more. I’ve conducted interviews with many different industry players, including most recently Silicon Knights President Denis Dyack, Microsoft Global Director of Games for Windows Kevin Unangst, EA Tiburon General Manager Philip Holt, Co-President of Naughty Dog Christophe Balestra, Microsoft Global Product Manager Hees Kyung, and Nintendo of Canada’s Marketing Manager Farjad Iravani amongst many others.

I’ve even had the chance to cover many different events over the years, including annual visits to CES in Las Vegas, E3 in Los Angeles, California, the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, Washington, GDC in San Francisco, California, and, naturally, Microsoft Canada’s “X” events and Sony Canada’s Holiday Preview events in Toronto, Ontario.

My work has been featured around the internet on sites like digg, Techmeme, slashdot, The Escapist, Evil Avatar, Joystiq, Kotaku, Newsweek’s Level Up, Google News, Yahoo News, AOL Games, The Times Online, St. Louis Today, various corporate blogs like Nvidia’s Developer Blog and The National Wildlife Foundation’s Arctic Promise, the homepages of developers like Bioware, NCSoft, and Atlus, and even on the broadcast airwaves via channels including News1130, AM1440 KMAJ, and AM1450 KNSI.

Alas, with the economy sinking and the publishing industry going down with the ship, I decided it was best to jump overboard when the opportunity arose. I was quickly picked up by Ganz in Toronto. Working with a team of other writers, I developed creative briefs for various online gaming projects under the Ganz Interactive umbrella. In effect, I was a creative writer and game designer. I also produced occasional analysis and diagnosis of the competition to inform the development of creative briefs and the overall creative plan for said IP.

After ten months of diligence, my hard work and determination were rewarded with a promotion to a position as a marketing writer and community manager. In this role, I was responsible for spear-heading some key marketing and PR initiatives. I helped to modernize the company, which had previously opted to shut out the press and direct consumers completely.

My work building a proprietary blog and smartly utilizing social media marketing established a voice for the company, improving the company’s consumer community, raising awareness of related products, and creating new revenue opportunities. As a result, my social communication platform was set as one of the Webkinz® division’s strategies for 2010.

With the foundation laid, I passed the role onto another marketing-savvy writer to take a new position as a technical writer for GTNA Solutions Corp. Currently, I am working on maintaining existing and creating new documentation to support software and hardware produced by the company in addition to business-related documentation including business requirements and scoping documents.

I continue to write, both at work and for fun, on a daily basis. Writing has been and continues to be a passion of mine. But I’ve also returned to programming as of late, and I’m working towards earning a Microsoft Certification in C# and .NET Web Application Development. If nothing else, I have a varied and interesting skill-set.

So that’s a bit about me. If you have any questions, business opportunities, hot stock tips, or other professionally-inclined inquiries, please don’t hesistate to email me.