I'm Gareth. I'm a Systems Engineer here at DMC. I work on a range of .NET projects, working on C# projects mainly. My favorite part of working here I think would be the people. My favorite social event would be the paintball explosion trip that we took for my Welcome Party. That was a lot of fun. I hit a lot of people, and it was a good day. It was surprisingly warm for December.
My favorite project since I've been at DMC has been working on a project for a company called Vector; they do pumper trucks mainly for cleaning of sewage pipes.
My favorite places in the city are Millennium Park; it's really nice to take people to when they visit, and then the Museum of Science and Industry is really fun to go around as well.
Outside of work I like to go swing dancing, sailing during the summer, and general fitness. Martial arts is something I've done pretty much since I was 15. I started out doing Kung Fu and some freestyle sparring. When I moved to Chicago I started doing more practically applicable styles of martial arts like Brazilian Jujitsu, Muay Thai, and MMA, but I'm a nice guy.
I had never stepped on a sailboat until my first day, and I didn't realize that my first day was actually a race day. I showed up on a Wednesday having never been on a sailboat, and there's a lot of following orders, and a lot of getting barked at which is absolutely fine as long as you take it with a grain of salt and just get down to it.
England and the States have pretty similar cultures. Chicago's a big city. The mid-westerners are very friendly and welcoming. It was a very easy place to settle in. I'll be going on a trip in September to climb Mount Rainier, which is the highest mountain in the continental US, so the lower 48. It's going to be my first experience of any real kind of high altitude.
DMC ping pong is probably more competitive than ping pong should be. It's fun. We have a ladder, and now we have a nice app that someone developed during one of our FedEx days where you can load your scores and results of your games. Ping pong is just a fun way of taking ten minutes off of work when you're bogged down with something and you need a break, refresh.