My Story

I have been a software developer since 1993, when the Internet really started taking off. At first, it was just a hobby done in my spare time. Later, when I was working for a mom-and-pop computer store whose big thing were custom-built computers, I took on the role of making some dynamic pages with an MS Access back-end. From there, I went to work at an ISP with a web development department.

While working at that ISP, I and another developer came up with a “poor man’s Ajax” for an e-Commerce site. We experimented with pair programming on that one and it was a lot of fun. This was in the pre-.net days when VBScript was all the rage and spaghetti code ruled the day.

From there, my wife and I changed towns and jobs and I found myself working at a company that marketed an on-site drug testing platform using a custom-built specimen cup and reader hooked up to a PC that was installed on-site. These are typically installed at Occupational Health Clinics and are mostly used for pre-employment drug screenings. It was while employed there that I started working in .net. In 2002, I attended WinDev, a development conference, in Boston. At the feet of Jeff Prosise, I learned ASP.NET, first coding in Notepad and using the command-line compiler.

After that, I worked on my employer’s intranet site, which was still in VBScript, while working on newer .net projects as well. I took over and re-wrote the billing system that later integrated with Microsoft’s Navision accounting package, using MSMQ and XML to facilitate exchange of information. I integrated FedEx and UPS web services into our internal workflows for shipping of specimen cups and readers. These where custom-built off-site. I traveled there and installed the custom workflows and made sure everything worked and streamlined their fulfillment.

After 8 years there, I moved to a new employer. They have an entire ecosystem of websites that help doctors and hospitals manage their Medicare and Medicaid revenue cycle. There are lots of back-end processes that do everything from scraping green-screens, to transferring files to and from external FTP/SFTP sites, to generating EDI files. I’ve worked on most of it and have moved some things forward to the “new hotness”.

In 2020, I’m leaving the medical field and embarking on the next work adventure. I’ll be journeying into the non-.NET works of functional programming and doing most of my work in an editor. So, I updated the code links to VS code instead of Visual Studio. I’m going to force myself to work in VS Code as that is most likely what I will be using in my day job.

So, why am I here? I’ve had a software project knocking around in my brain for a long time that I wanted to come to fruition. I also not only wanted to work with the latest and greatest dev tech, but I wanted to share my thoughts and insights into the craft of software development. If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you will see more of my employment details and where I’d like to go. I would love to get into software architecture but I know I don’t quite have enough experience. I hope to remedy some of that with this project.

This is still kind of a hobby for me, even though my day job is development. But this side project just won’t stay quiet any longer. It’s time to start working on it.

Thanks for stopping by. Feel free to comment on any blog post and once code starts arriving, I hope you’ll travel with me on this journey. I expect to learn a lot. And by learning, I just might inspire someone else.

– Brian