Diary.Dev

Welcome to the new home of my ramblings. I hope that I will be able to contribute some knowledge to developers everywhere.

A bit about myself is in order.

I started developing software a long, long time ago. Let's put the number at an even thirty years. At that time, it was rare to see young kids writing things. I mostly learned on Commodore products. First was the PET. Then, I discovered the Commodore 64. It came maxed out with 64K of RAM. I thought it was endless. And, it stayed that way for me. I eventually learned the assembly language on there and wrote a few interesting things to extend the native BASIC interpretor. Then, college came.

My first programming class was using Pascal. I took to it and started to realize that my earlier learning put me at a distinct advantage. Variables? Arrays? Binary math? I could translate these concepts to my prior learning. I started writing applications to reformat my source code. I don't think the teachers knew about it. At least, when I helped other students, I ran my application and had it format their solutions much differently than mine. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea. But, I tried to make sure the people I helped undersood what was going on and not just copying code.

The next languages proved just as interesting. C was still in its infancy. I started to learn new concepts that didn't directly translate to my first language, BASIC. Then, came x86 assembly language. I was thankful for being exposed to some concepts in C. They made playing with the machine at the assembly level that much more fun. I ended up writing applications that would test the other students' applications that had the same class after me. I used it when grading assignments as a grader and lab assistant. I continued to expand my horizons when I got exposed to Excel.

At that time, I was a shift manager for a local restaurant franchise. I hated sitting down with a calculator at the end of the night to do the paperwork. So, I wrote an Excel spreadsheet to do it all for me. And, then I realized that I needed to write some scripting code to really make Excel do what I needed to do. Namely, I had to do a whole lot of data copying and clearing in order to setup things for the next day. I ended up taking a co-op position with a local government agency doing help desk duties: troubleshooting hardware and user issues, installing and upgrading computers for staff. That local restaurant? They weren't done with me, even though I was cutting back and only working there on the weekends.

As I got closer to graduating college, it just got too hard to juggle the co-op position (which had turned into a direct contract employment situation), school, and the weekend job. So, I left the restaurant completely. That's when I found out that they'd like to have computers installed at all of the restaurants in the franchise. I was paid to purchase, deliver, setup, and assist them with their basic needs. I was told that they would all learn how to use the computers on their own. I only had to train them on how to use that custom spreadsheet to do their paperwork. And, I got paid every time that I had to help them.

And, things were good for a time. The franchise manager and owner then wanted to be able to see the paperwork from every store first thing in the morning. That was my introduction to the .net framework from Microsoft. I wrote an addin for Excel that would upload all of the paperwork to a network in my house. I then wrote a service that waited for the files that were uploaded through FTP to a location on one of my servers. It would parse and dump everything into a database. Finally, I wrote a website that the managers could log into and then view all of the paperwork.

Then I moved to the country where I didn't have any internet access. My custom solution and privately hosted website wouldn't work. I had to rewrite everything to run on a hosted site. Gone was the custom upload listener. In its place was a web service. Gone was the current addin. A new one had to be written. I split things up on the client. They no longer got stuck when the files couldn't be uploaded. Instead, they'd just build up on their machine until an internet connection was established. I rewrote the database and made it much cleaner from my earlier incarnation. A nice side effect was shrinking the data from over 20GB to about 100MB. Huge savings. (Did you realize that storing integers and decimals instead of key/value string pairs is a big win?) And, I finally rewrote the website to make it more flexible. Managers could now pick and choose what data they wanted to see, and on which days.

Now, during all this time, I was always learning. As the .net framework matured, I learned all that I could. I guess that I made a good impression on the management at that local government agency. I was the first person every hired as a full time employee without having an interview. I've been a major influence in the internal software development there. I introduced them to ASP.Net, Windows Forms, SQL Server Reporting Services, and now Silverlight.

Ok. I think that's enough history and background. Now, let's get to the fun stuff.