Joseph Barrett Hall
Joseph B. Hall has been a professional software developer for more than 30 years. He worked as a programmer for IBM and Microsoft. He was the software architect for a Fortune 500 bank, the CTO for an online ticket sales and servicing company, and started his own consulting company in 2006. These days, Joe is stretching his Agile / TDD muscles with ThoughtWorks in Atlanta, Georgia.
Joe makes his living writing desktop, web, mobile device, and server applications for businesses and governmental agencies, but game programming is his passion, and it was gaming that got him into programming in the first place. Joe was a member of the original Xbox team and he joined the Visual Studio .NET team just after the Xbox was released in 2001. He is the author of XNA Game Studio Express: Developing Games for Windows and the Xbox 360, which was published in 2007, and Fauxcabulary: Fake Definitions / Real Funny, which was published in 2015.
Joe lives with his wife of 30 years and his three daughters in Newnan, Georgia. Every summer, he teaches high school students how to write games during an intense weeklong course in North Carolina for Landry Academy. In his free time, Joe dabbles in sketching, cartooning, and creating 3D models. When you see his artistic creations, you'll understand why he makes his living as a programmer.