Billy Ashmall grew up in a small town in Western New York named
Chautauqua where he attended Chautauqua Central School, a small local school. Billy has always been very active.
As a child he would spend most of his time running around outside or riding his bike. He competed in several 10K road races before even entering high school.
As Billy entered high school he knew it was time to grow up so he updated his name to Bill Ashmall and joined the big leagues. Bill quickly entered as many of the sport teams as would fit into
a high school year while continuing to compete in road races and even a couple of triathlons. It was in this time frame that Bill got his first sense of computer programming.
His family bought an ATARI 400 along with the BASIC cartridge. He spent many hours creating cool things and finding out what he could make a computer do. One of his favorite things
that he made at this young age was a graphical recreation of the Donkey Kong game. He hadn't figured out collision detection at that point but it looked really cool.
Years later as Bill Ashmall entered college for the first time he didn't really have direction as to what he wanted to do. He spent the time there gaining a humanities degree
and years of useful life experience. It would be a long time before he realized he missed his calling. As the internet boom started Bill again found the fun and excitement that
comes from creating applications and the such on a computer. He knew it was time for a change and that he had to go back to school so he could learn how to program effectively.
With that Bill decided to embrace his younger name and again became Billy Ashmall. He researched his options and set out on a course to learn about computers and programming.
Billy loved programming and learning about writing code. He excelled in the classes and even got to help other with their projects. At first it was a lot of copy and paste
because this code worked over here it will work over there. It wasn't until one evening when Billy was helping a friend with his project and his friend kept saying 'but why does it do that?'
that he really gained the understanding. He walked through the code with his friend one line at a time on paper tracing the variables, building the objects and all of a sudden it just made sense!
To this day Billy still thanks Scott for asking why. One simple question with such a life changing answer.
When Billy got to
RIT he ran into a project manager from
Xerox who was taking one of the classes that he was. She quickly offered him a co-op as a software engineer that of course he accepted gratefully.
He was a little worried as they didn't even use the language he had learned in school but they assured him it would be easy to pick up. On the first day Billy walked in and was taken to his new
cube. The room was a huge cubed space that was pretty dark. He wasn't sure if there was anyone actually there yet other than him but as he walked past the cubes he saw people in them
working away. It was sometime in that first week that Billy knew that this was what he wanted to do with his life, Software Engineer!
Billy graduated from RIt and it was time to find a new job. He was looking through the school job postings and came across one that said Geospatial Software Engineer. Knowing that he knew
two of the three words in that job title he thought this is perfect for Billy Ashmall. One resume and three interviews later he started his new job and had learned what that third word meant, mapping!
Billy took on many projects as IAGT and became an expert an many aspects of Geospatial Software Engineering. While he was at IAGT Billy was contracted partially to a NASA project called
SERVIR. Billy Ashmall did a lot of small tasks remotely from New York for
SERVIR
which was based in Huntsville Alabama. As
SERVIR grew so too did their need for someone like Billy. They increased their contract
to cover 100% of Billy's time first followed by relocating him to Huntsville where he is currently located.
SERVIR is an awesome
project! One of the best parts about it is that it gives us the chance to give back to society and help people who are really in need of services that we can readily provide to them.
Billy doesn't plan to leave the Huntsville area anytime soon as he enjoys all aspects of life here including work, play, climate, neighboring areas and more. If you would like to get in touch
with Billy Ashmall you may use the contact info at the top of this page of simply click the
Contact link and fill out the form. I'm sure that he would love to hear from you!
