Darian Hickman
I love warm weather, soccer, social entrepreneurs, and Jesus. I'm obsessed about the future and want to design it via a video game called Village the Game: http://www.villagethegame.com. To get the updates about my adventures join my newsletter at:
http://groups.google.com/group/Darian-Hickman
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StrengthsFinder Results: I'm Futuristic - Thursday, December 21, 2006  I took the online test at www.StrengthsFinder.com and found out my top 5 strengths are:
Labels: aboutme, store, strengthsfinder Orkut Profile - Thursday, September 29, 2005
Resume of Darian Hickman -
Desired Responsibilities
1. Acting in films/videos/commercials or on stage dramas to promote your cause. 2. Delivering presentations to promote your cause. 3. Teaching classes on how to use your products and services. Education Graduated May 2001 with B.S. in Computer Science from The Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering, Baltimore, Maryland 21218. Leadership Experience (1) Recruited geek friends to help me build a customized PC for blind friend with profound motion and sensation deficits. November 2002 – May 2005; (2) Lead and participated in a men's Bible study to help fellow Christians set and acheive their spiritual goals. March 2002 – May 2005.; (3) Organized investment group with friends from Northern VA and Baltimore to invest in residential properties. Aug 2004 – March 2005; (4) Organized games of Cashflow to help friends and family better understand investing. July 2004 – March 2005. (5) Project Manager, Web Developer, Students Sharing Coalition, Sept 1997 - 2000 (5.1) Founded and directed high school group to address labor rights of developing nations. (5.2) Wrote successful grant proposal to fund multimedia lab for the homeless. (5.3) Trained and managed students in renovation of low-income housing with Habitat for Humanity. (5.4) Designed, built, maintained, managed content, and hosted StudentsSharing.org on my Linux, Apache server. (5.5) Installed office LAN and maintained office workstations. (6) Served as Student Government President at Middlesex High School, Saluda, VA. Sept 1996 - May 1997. (7) Coached youth soccer league (12-14 year olds). Middlesex County, VA. Fall 1994 and Fall 1995. Volunteer Experience (1) YWAM Virginia. Volunteered a myriad of IT services from installing a small computer lab to training YWAM staff on how to use advance features of GMail, Blogger, Google Video. (2) Performing on CrossCurrent Ministries Drama Team Aug 2004 - Present. (3) Served at a summer bible school in Trinidad on a missions trip with CrossCurrent Ministries. August 2002 (4) Taught computer literacy classes at Greenmount Community Center. Spring 1998. (5) Installed office LAN and maintained office workstations at Faith Christian Fellowship. Summer 2001. Military Training/Experience (1) Completed Basic Training for US Marine Corps Reserves. 19 Feb-25 Jul 2004. (2) Assigned and drilling with 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, July 2004 - Present. Work Experience Mission Adventures Intern, Youth With A Mission Orlando, May 30- Aug 12 2005 (1) Responsible for training youth groups from various churches how to do overseas missions. (2) Taught street drama to convey message of the gospels (3) Lead groups in mercy ministry for the homeless. (4) Participated in intercessory prayer on behalf of students and staff. Technology Management Associates, June 2004 – Apr 2005 (1) Built Java apps and PLSQL packages to transform data from various datasources (xml files, oracle) into oracle tables. (2) Upgraded and maintained JSP based webapps to display timeline and geospatial data. (3) Evaluated additional uses for Microstrategy Intelligence Server. (4) Evaluated usefulness of Informatica for data transformation. Object Sciences Corporation, Software Engineer, Sept. 2003 – June 2004. (1) Evaluated the best jabber instant messaging platforms for deploying amongst Object Sciences employees and Object Sciences customers. (2) Learned basics of Jboss installation and administration. (3) Learned basics of VMWare ESX server installation and administration. (4) Wrote tutorial on Cities of Information, a situational awareness tool built in-house. (5) Learned Hibernate, an Object to Relational Mapping tool. (6) Learned Apache Ant, a build automation tool for Java development. ITT Industries, Advanced Engineering and Sciences, Software Engineer, Jan. 2002 – Sept. 2003 (1) Developed multithreaded Java applications using Borland JBuilder to interface with various hardware components in a server rack. (2) Developed Perl scripts to test Java applications. (3) Administered Linux server and network for software team. (4) Trained teammates in Java, Perl, and Linux. Business Development, D-Fusion, INC, April 2001-July 2001 (1) Researched early adopters for D-Fusion web-mining patents. (2) Developed data-filtering software products primarily in Java with a few scripts in Perl. (3) Made presentations to early stage investors and clients. Intern Web Application Developer, Visual Multimedia Technologies June 1999-Present (1) Designed and built Chinalane.com (e-commerce site) using Mysql and Perl. (2) Helped code and test ActivTrax.com using MS SQLServer and PHP. (3) Expanded Cold Fusion site for Department of CellBio at Johns Hopkins University. Intern Web Application Developer, Roanoke Technology Corporation, June 2000-Aug 2000 (1) Helped build B2B bid-management system (RFQHosting.com). (1.1) Coded in Perl for a Postgres DBMS on UNIX platform. (1.2) Used Javascript heavily for validating and expediting web form input. (2) Built Perl interface to GIMP, a graphics app, for automatically generating images in a template-driven web-hosting application. Web Developer, Department of Materials Science, JHU May 1998-Jan 2001 Designed and built Demobase a searchable online database of Materials Science demonstrations. Used MS Access DBMS with Cold Fusion interface. Grunt, Henley's Do-It Center, Sept 1996-May 1997 (1) Manned cash register. (2) Loaded customers vehicles. (3) Ran inventory. Carpenter, Manifest Construction, Summers of 1993-1997. (1) Installed framing, masonry, windows, and patios for home renovations. (2) Painted interiors and exteriors. Certifications/Qualifications (1) Granted Top Secret Security Clearance (SSBI/SCI), March 2002. (2) Completed CI Poly, September 2004. ■ 2259 Castle Rock Sq #22C, Reston, VA 20191 | DARIAN@DARIA NHICKMAN.COM | (407) 697-6392 My Spiritual Journey -
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." -Ecclesiastes 1:2
I remember a clear sunny day riding home from school on the big yellow bus when I first tried tracing 'why' all the way back. "Why I am riding on this bus?" To go to school and back. "Why am I going to school?" So I can get a job one day. "Why am I getting a job?" So I can raise a family. "Why am I raising a family and having kids?" So my kids can do the same thing I'm doing: Go to school. Go to job. Start a family. It's an endless cycle with no ultimate destination. "Well hold on maybe I'll find the cure for cancer or something and help humanity move forward?" So what? What is the point of advancing society? "Well the more we advance society the less people will suffer." So what? What is the ultimate purpose of reducing the suffering in the world? What will that lead to? The universe clearly doesn't have a problem with humans suffering from all sorts of things. Besides, if all the humans disappeared there would not be any human suffering. So that can't be the ultimate purpose of anyone's existence--alleviate human suffering; help humanity move forward. It's a circular problem. Humans can't be their own ultimate purpose for existing. If you delete humans from existence you delete the problem. If all humans were gone, would the universe miss them? No. "Well maybe God would miss us?" So what? What is the problem with God being lonely in the universe? If God is the creator of everything then he created loneliness. Why not just delete loneliness and solve the problem that way? Matter of fact why doesn't God delete himself? Then all problems would be solved. No humans to keep God company therefore no human suffering. No God therefore no lonely God. "Wow! There is no ultimate purpose to any of this. There is no ultimate purpose for my existence. There is no ultimate purpose for God's existence. There is no ultimate purpose for existence, period." "If all of Existence ceased to exist, would anyone care?" Years later I learned to summarize this conclusion with a simple riddle, "If all of Existence ceased to exist, would anyone care?" Even with that glaringly obvious question, some people still don't get what I'm talking about when I say there is no ultimate purpose for Existence. That's okay. At least the guy who wrote Ecclesiastes seemed to understand what I was getting at. Dying and ceasing to exist are not the same thing. "Well Mr. Existence is Pointless, why don't you just kill yourself since your life is ultimately pointless?" Well, dying doesn't mean you cease to exist. It just means you're dead. Even though having an afterlife is pointless there is still a possibility it exists. Our Creator certainly doesn't require things to have an ultimate purpose when deciding what should exist. And there's no guarantee that afterlife is any better than current life. Suicide might piss God off. God is possible. I'm thirteen and functionally agnostic. "What do you care what God thinks, he's pointless, so his opinion obviously should not matter to you? Besides there is no need for God so what really makes you think there is a God?" Nothing makes me believe there is definitely a God, but God is certainly a possibility. Nonexistence is possible, but not likely. So now what? "Well if life is ultimately pointless and you possibly don't have the option of nonexistence then what is there worth doing?" I searched for the answer to that question for the rest of my teenage years. "What goals are worth pursuing?" My search lead me through the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, through Deepak Chopra, through Gandhi, through I Ching, through eastern philosophies that seemed to me more straightforward and well thought out than Christianity. Christianity felt like Fisher Price Theology. Christianity: Osh Kosh B'God. Christianity always felt like a cartoonish explanation of God. A God so human-like with emotions and jealousy and anger and happiness. The authors of the Bible must have thrown that stuff in there just to make it more user-friendly for the masses. Christianity: the Macintosh of Organized Religion. The Eastern religions made a lot more sense. God is a simple abstract force in the universe. A set of consistent principles that Yogi's or zen monks or ninjas could learn and live harmoniously with to achieve their goals. I studied the weather patterns of life as documented by the I Ching: The Book of Changes. A very curious book about balancing the yin and yang, earthly and heavenly, passive and active forces of my life. I only have theories on how it could lead me to such powerful insights through its hexagrams. My simplest theory is Luke 11:9 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” I sought wisdom so He gave it to me. Visualization: think of it as multimedia prayer. When I was young teenager Stephen Covey mentioned it and Shakti Gawain spelled it all out for me: Creative Visualization. I learned to visualize things I wanted and it became so effective that it forced me to take seriously that there is some intelligent force at work in the universe that science had not yet explained. Heading into eigth grade, I remember spending all summer daydreaming about this beautiful girl in my class. Towards the end of the summer Dad tells me he wants to try going to a church. This is the first time I ever remember my dad wanting to attend church. And of course the one person I knew at that church was that girl. I should have visualized courage to ask her out too. Oh well, better luck next time. I'm seventeen and I got some cool soul skills. Now what? So all this eastern mysticism, all this searching for ways to expand my influence over my present reality it didn't answer the big question: "If there is no ultimate purpose to existence, then what is worth doing with my life?" So I went back to the biographies I really admired, everyone from Jesus to Leonardo da Vinci to Gandhi. Towards the end of high school, all these biographies and all these teachings came down to one verb: Love. The only thing worth doing with one's life is to love others. Love is the Game. Who is the Guru? "So love is the answer. Which teacher knew this and expressed this above all others?" Jesus. The greatest philosopher of all time. Mind you, I did not consider myself a Christian because of this conclusion. I knew Jesus was a great teacher and somebody worth emulating. I learned this from all the biographies of the people I admired. However, I had no intention of affiliating myself with a group of people who blindly followed religious dogma; who cared more about banning abortion and fighting gay rights than living out the highest commandments: "Luke 10:27 He answered: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ [ Deut. 6:5] ; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ [ Lev. 19:18] ” Most Christians I knew back then were just not that impressive, certainly not like the hard core Christians I had read about like Mother Theresa, and St. Francis of Assisi. I had no motivation to call myself a Christian and no emotional connection to Jesus' death on the cross. It was Jesus' life that impressed me. That is what I decided I should strive to emulate. In the final years of my adolescence I focused my spiritual study almost exclusively on emulating Jesus and simultaneously paying little heed to conventional Christianity or to the whole issue of sin and redemption. Sin is silly. College Christians are sincere but seemingly sedated. Sin didn't mean much of anything to me. I've made mistakes in the past, but I never really felt condemned to Hell. Salvation solved a problem I didn't have. The challenge and adventure of emulating Christ's life kept me intrigued for years leading into college. So I read the Bible on a regular basis. The parts that made sense like prayer, meditating, fasting, keeping few possessions, and having a heart of charity I pursued with a vengeance. The parts that didn't make sense like: "Why would God send someone to eternal punishment for temporary mistakes?" or "Why is homosexuality a sin?" or "Why should Adam's sin ruin my chances to become sinless like Christ?" those questions I set to the side. Into sophomore year I found myself attending bible studies and hanging out more and more with Christians, no one hard-core like St. Francis of Assisi but definitely students sincere in their faith in Christ. Sophomore year sucked. Time to sit in silence by a stream and accept salvation. Then sophomore year brought on stress like I had never experienced before in my life. 19 credits of mostly boring and stressful classes and working 10 hours a week and pseudo-dating a girl that was mostly just causing me more grief. One October weekend I had to get away from it all and spend some time in the woods down by the stream behind Hopkins campus. I was reading Living Faith by Jimmy Carter. He was impressive in a more conventional sense. He did a lot to share God's love with others and at the same time he also raised a family. Sitting there on a rock along the stream behind Hopkins campus I asked God what is the next step in my spiritual growth? The answer came quietly and clearly, "Accept salvation, pledge your allegiance to Christ and get baptized." Accepting salvation was a huge step for me. Jesus is not just the greatest gamer of this grand game of life. He is the Game. Not much really profoundly changed in my life after accepting salvation through Christ, but it meant acknowledging that Jesus' death on the cross mattered to me. It meant that achieving Nirvana, Samadhi, complete fulfillment, getting into heaven, being one with God, or winning the game of life depended completely on another human being. It meant winning the game of life wasn't just about emulating the highest quality example, like studying Pele to become the greatest soccer player. There was this extra unintuitive/awkward part where I had to admit that I couldn't win the game by training hard. Only Jesus wins the game and only by joining his victory dance do we get to taste victory ourselves. Not very intuitive for me at all. It still befuddles me some. The whole concept of God's grace is still sinking in. I have the freedom to love and not worry about anything else. I'm still learning that the game of life isn't about becoming a household name as a great spiritual leader. It's not about going hard-core to earn my page in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It's about accepting a free gift from a benevolent God. It's about taking that free gift of salvation and being set free from sin. And it is about using that freedom to freely love God and to love others without having to worry about anything else. No Purpose. Play anyway and play to win. Like I said at the beginning, there is no ultimate purpose to this whole game of existence. My stance hasn't changed on that at all. However it has no bearing on my decisions because I don't believe we have the option of ceasing to exist. So since we are here playing this game, we may as well play to win. Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. -John 14:6 I'm following Jesus because he is the only real way to win. High School Graduation Article -
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Here's an old about me post; I really should update this - Wednesday, September 28, 2005
July 2004
I'm living in Northern Virginia at the moment. I go to a really cool church called CrossCurrent . Also I'm working at a company called TMA . The coolest organization I worked for during college and to this day my favorite job is Students Sharing Coalition . They are a very cool nonprofit organization based in Baltimore MD where I went to school at Johns Hopkins University . I got a BS degree from the Computer Science Department . Originally I went in with the intention to build education/learning software that was so advanced that it would come to dominate the way education was performed. That hasn't happened yet. Instead I discovered a more urgent cause, the Labor Rights Movement. I went to a bunch of different seminars where activists spoke. I even formed a group under the auspices of Students Sharing Coalition to recruit high school students to raise awareness of these issues in schools and beyond. We did some work to support the Workers Rights Consortium . After working on that cause I grew a little disenchanted with what I had to offer to the movement. Although raising awareness was fun, I wanted to do something more tangible to help the poor and the oppressed as we are called to do in various parts of the Bible. Also I was tired of struggling with how to balance my pursuit of such a demanding degree from Hopkins with this extracurricular that was so blatantly unrelated to computer science. (For the most part I was the only engineer outside of the Environmental Engineers that took interest in the movement). I also had to balance with my social life in Hopkins Christian Fellowship . Most of my Christian friends were not involved in such a blatantly liberal dominated movement. It made me sad and angry that my Christian friends neglected this effort that was so blatantly in line with the heart of God. Then again, most of my friends weren't willing to sacrifice their study time or their GPAs like I was. I had no intention of prolonging my agony into grad school. Quite frankly I had already learned way more about computers than I ever wanted to know. The only thing that kept me going was enormous opportunities to support these social justice causes with my technological wizardry. I got to help the cause a little bit. But again, maintaining my B- average took a lot of time from these ideas that I had. Also, most of the stuff that I thought about building already existed. I'm not a big fan of reinventing the wheel. Everything from online donation services , to employee-owned cooperatives was already out there. I started learning more about what already existed to help people overcome the poverty and oppression they endure. I realized that bridging the gap between the technology tools and the people that needed was mostly a marketing task. That's when I read Diffusion of Innovations . Bam! All the big picture problems and solutions running through my head for 4 excruciating years at Hopkins were all summarized in this one freaking book, already at its 4th Edition. I didn't discover this book until after I graduated. Largely the issues I was facing were marketing and business model issues. Business was already an interest of mine, because I was always trying to come up with ideas for self-sustaining organizations to help the poor help themselves. I discovered that there was already a name for this concept too, social-entrepreneurship . People start for-profit businesses for the sake of alleviating poverty. The first time I had ever heard of the concept was back in high school when I read about the Grameen Bank in Parade magazine. Simple concept: give small loans to poor entrepreneurs so they can start businesses to support their families. It took off like wildfire and now there's all kinds of microenterprise organizations. Now I'm figuring out how to segway my technical career into a business oriented career. My main hope is a Christian organization called World Hope . They are actually just 4 miles from the Object Sciences office. They do several microenterprise projects along withall kinds of community development projects. They provide solutions to real problems in a Christ-based fashion. |
