Work Experience

For the approximately two decades that I worked as a software developer before transitioning more into network administration, I often filled a niche of taking legacy code and either maintaining it using its "native" development environment or updating it using more modern ones. At Macy's Systems and Technology (then Federated Systems Group), I worked on a code base written in Visual Basic 3 and PowerBASIC at the same time that Visual Basic was moving from version 4 to 5, then to 6, and then finally to Visual Basic.NET.

Most of the time I was an independent contractor, I worked in Visual Basic 6. There was one application comprising a Visual Basic 6 front end and a QuickBasic back end. This was a practice management system that a dentist had written to run his multi-office practice and which he wanted to bring to market. Another application to which I provided a large number of fixes and enhancements was a Visual Basic 6 front end with a MUMPS back end. It was another practice management system, this time for medical testing labs.

Now that I work as a network administrator, I'm still coding, it's just not my primary activity anymore. I wrote a program in C# to automate the creation of student accounts for our college and several PowerShell scripts to automate bulk changes to accounts.

History

Like so many others these days, I'm a self-taught programmer. Well...mostly self-taught, since I took computer classes in high school (including AP Computer Science) and then a couple more in my first year of college. I learned C and C++ on my own, then Visual Basic when it first came out. After learning Perl to use in conjunction with VBA for automating the creation of reports in the form of Excel spreadsheets for my job at Macy's, I really became interested in learning new languages. I experimented with Ruby when it first came out, but decided I didn't really like it. I dabbled in PHP for a while, and most recently have been working in PowerShell and Python. Now that I have a very good grasp of what creating a program involves, I'm able to pick up and make use of new languages quickly.