Who's this guy anyway?

Well, after upgrading and modifying the template for this blog a bit it doesn't look tooo bad. It'll work. Cheaper than subscribing to typepad.

So who the heck am I? Well, for starters I've been developing software in some form since 1979, when my highschool purchased one of those new, fancy TRS-80 computers. That was such a smashing success they also bought a couple of Apple II's. BASICally, that started my programming career. Through college I made beer (er, rootbeer) money by developing spreadsheets and databases in Lotus 123 and dBase II and III (ah, Ashton Tate, we miss you...sort of.) As I became more and more proficient in dBase III I found that the larger systems I was developing often suffered from performance problems - both from design and simply due to overreaching the capacity and intent of dBaseIII. Enter 'C' - fast and dangerous. Just how I liked it.

Over the years I've developed extensively in C, C++, Java (a love affair matched only by my espresso machine) and C# (a warm spot in my heart too). Over the past 8 years here in Atlanta I've written IMAP, SMTP and fax servers for a unified messaging startup (RIP), wrote a very fine meta-search engine for another startup, DotPlanet (RIP) along with news spiders, stock quoting feed, portfolio account aggregation website (etc.). After DotPlanet went the path of the dodo bird I landed at another startup in the telecommunications industry - a fiber optic equipment provider. I led the team that wrote their EMS (element management system), an all Java endeavor.

For the past several years I've been consulting for McKesson, rewriting and redesigning software. For them it's been PDA applications in C#.Net using webservices to talk to a gSoap and standard IIS webservices server. Also a C# application server to translate from the diverse messages of their customers into their diverse robotic and automation back end systems. That was fun. Lots of XML and even wrote them a portable VB Scripting engine to embed that ran on Windows and Linux (under mono).

Presently I'm working on a personal finance web application, designed to help people who are seriously in debt and serious about being debt free. Tune into our friend Dave Ramsey for an insight into the massive problem our country finds itself in. Naturally, that means that lately I've been knee deep in Web 2.0 - CSS, Javascript, browser incompatibilities, etc. Hopefully I'll be able to post up some links to websites and resources that have helped.

So, let's see:

• C/C++ (and ASM, back in the day)
  
• Java
• C#
• Spattering of Perl, PHP and other scripting languages
• Java
• web application servers including CGI, Java JSP, servlets, IIS/ISAPI, ASP, ASP.Net
  

If it's starting to sound like a sales pitch...isn't it always? :)

On a personal note, check out my theology blog. I'm a former Seventh-day Adventist (a category of person SDA's hold lower than Wicca) and served for a time in pastoral ministry. In a nutshell, I studied my way right through the church like an arrow through a target. Having grown up in the church it made sense until I looked deeper and more honestly.