About Abstrys 🔗

Abstrys.com is the personal site of Eron Hennessey.

Who's Eron? 🔗

I'm a fellow living in the Pacific Northwest, USA.

Programming and writing 🔗

My professional life has been spent in the programming and writing trades (and in the combination of the two).

From March 2012 until February, 2026, I worked as a Senior Programmer/Writer at Amazon.com for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon's internal developer tools group.

I've been working various jobs in the software industry since the mid 1990s, beginning at Microsoft in 1995, where I worked for the Advanced Technology Group as a SDET contractor, and later moving through the DirectX/Direct3D groups as an SDET, the Windows Vista (Direct Video) group as an SDE, and then as a Programmer/Writer for the Windows Embedded (WEPOS), XBox 360 SDK and XNA Game Studio products.

My time at Microsoft wasn't contiguous. Between my SDET years and later SDE and Programmer/Writer years, I worked for Chromium Communications as a network and language technology programmer, and at Surreal Software as a game programmer on Fellowship of the Ring (PS2 version) and The Suffering (also on PS2).

Before working at Microsoft, I was primarily a programming hobbyist, first learning FORTRAN on my own at about 11 years old, followed by BASIC, C, and C++. The first system I worked with was a Prime minicomputer (can't remember the model, but likely a Prime 750 or 850, given the time...). Soon after, I got my first "personal" computer, a Commodore VIC-20, which was also the system on which I programmed my first game—a top-down, terminal-based, single-player space racing/survival game. I also created a periodic table quiz game to help me get through chemistry classes in junior high school. As a freshman in high school, I built a simple graphic editing program on an Apple II+ where you would use the arrow keys to move around, pixel-by-pixel, and choose from a 256-color palette for each pixel. With it, I drew my first computer art—a rendering of Magenta from Rocky Horror Picture Show...

I then got my hands on an Amiga 1000, and was hooked on both programming and creating computer artworks, building various applications to entertain myself and others, or to perform tasks that I couldn't find another suitable program for. I had a brief stint as a 3D animator, where I created some opening graphics for Seattle's Metro Transit training films using VideoScape 3D.

My primary OS today is Linux (Fedora), but have also used CPM, MS-DOS, Windows (starting at 3.0), Windows NT, the "classic" Mac OS, NeXT OS X (AKA macOS), NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, BeOS, FreeBSD, and various Linux distros over the years (Slackware, SUSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu).

Other pursuits 🔗

Outside of my career in the software industry, I practice and teach martial arts, dance, appreciate and play music, spend plenty of time in the forest, and involve myself in activities that inspire within me a deep appreciation for life and its experience.

Linking and quoting 🔗

You can freely link to these pages provided that the content and context is relevant to the content of my pages. You can also quote text from them, provided that you include a link or attribution with the quote.

For any further use of this website or its contents, please contact me via the contact information below.

How to contact me 🔗

I can be contacted by email at eron@abstrys.com.