Being tradition I’m going to use my first blog post as a bit of an introduction about myself, what I do, and where I’m going.
So my name’s James, I’m 23 as of writing this blog post. (Yeah, I know I’m a youngster, and I might not know what I’m talking about) However, unlike most my age I’m mature enough to listen and take in advice if I’m wrong about something so please feel free to correct me. The sole purpose for my blog is education, to make being a great software developer an easy and achievable task!
I work in Leeds, a city in England at a software house that produces management and data capture software for the print & media industry. I’m the youngest developer at the company, but (without bigging myself up too much) I’m probably one of the most competent there. (Hey, when it comes to your job confidence is good!) We’ve got a few skilled people here, and we consistently work as a team and produce some of the best products availiable in our industry, breaking bounds and introducing new technologies to make our customers more effective.
That being said, my particular areas that I specialise at my work are:
- VB6 development (You may say “Yawn” or you may say “WTF, you’re a little too young for VB6?”) I’ll start by saying you’re right, on both counts. Visual Basic 6 is tedious and slow. But what do you expect for a product that was release when I was 9. I know this stuff, because I learnt Visual Basic 5 (Yep, even older) when I was at Junior School. (Forgive the UK/US school grades, whatever grade you were when you were 10)
- VB.NET Development. This ones a lot more up to date. I work with most versions, starting at 2.0, through to 4.5 (the latest one).
- WPF Development. This has been a personal passion of mine, ever since I first laid eyes on the technology in use (those lovely looking Windows messenger UIs when they first came out) I’ve wanted to duplicate it.
- ASP development. Oh, yeah, did I say I was old skool? I’ve got dozens of projects written using classic ASP, and ASP WebForms. One of my aims over the next few years it to work on more MVC webs, and make use of the benefits of a loosely coupled architecture brings.
- SQL Server. Lucky you. I’ll be providing some resources on SQL Server, (specifically Microsoft SQL Server) – and Azure. (I’ll also touch on some No-SQL alternatives)
- ORM wrappers. (For those of you who’re unsure, that stands for Object Relational Mapper)
- And the rest that I don’t have time to go into more detail today; JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML/XSL, PLC, Micro framework, Win Mobile, and Windows 8 development.
Anyway, I could ramble all day, but I think that’ll do for my first post.
I hope you enjoy the deliciousness of my blog, as much as I enjoy sharing the information.
Until next time!
abbottdev 