The Rest of the Profile

When I last left off on my background our hero was locked in his bedroom after slamming the door so hard it broke when saving a program failed.

The College Hiatus
After leaving high school I worked in retail, went on a religious mission to Brazil, and lived in Illinois just long enough to meet and marry my fantastic wife and spirit her off to Utah where I entered the University of Utah. For a while I was a performing arts major. I contemplated sociology and philosophy as majors, but finally settled on economics. I planned on completing my undergraduate degree and going on to law school.

That plan got sidetracked about 3 years in when I became a research assistant for a couple of PhD students. After years of using a computer for word processing and playing Links, I found myself introduced to QuattroPro, Excel, SAS and SPSS. I began writing VBA macros in Excel to transpose data for import into the statistics packages. And I realized that I kind of liked playing with numbers on computers.

As I neared graduation, the adviser to the PhD students referred me to a Labor Market Economist at the Utah Department of Employment Security, which was later to become the Utah Department of Workforce Services. This economist needed an intern to help run occupational wage surveys. After 9 months as an intern I was hired full-time as an economist.

The Transition
Over the next couple of years I spent a lot of time dealing with Excel data files and Access database, and writing research reports on wages and economic conditions in Utah. I also found myself in the position of mediating and translating between economists and prevailing wage specialists, and programmers hired to build occupational information systems.

In 1998 I got my 'big break'. The lead programmer on one of these projects left the state and I was allowed to take over a widely distributed Access application. Over the next several months I converted the back end to SQL Server and stored procedures and the front end to a classic ASP application. That application has been upgraded a couple of times and is about to go through a major rewrite. I was a paid professional programmer.

Over the next two years I found myself more and more integrated into a programming unit that was responsible for creating economic forecasting software, and occupational information systems. It was an amazingly good fit, and allowed me to be a programmer while still using the economics and statistics I learned in school.

Embracing the Curly Brace
As the .Net framework and VS.Net became available, I made the decision to switch to C# rather than move to VB.Net. The reasons for this decision may be a good topic for another post, but for now it's enough to know that I consider myself primarily a C# web developer of database driven web applications. I do a little SQL Server DBA work, and for the last year have been working in PL/SQL on a major web application that hits an Oracle database.

The Early Years

True to my normal behavior, I am reading about 5 books right now. It seems I always have a work or two of fiction and two or three tech books going at once. On of the books I am reading is the classic The Pragmatic Programmer.

In that book, which I highly recommend to anyone on the programming side of the IT world, the authors talk a lot about taking pride in and responsibility for your work. On of the ways they suggest you do that is by signing your work. In that spirit, I changed my profile to reveal my name, and figured I would do a couple of 'background' posts to let all three of you who don't actually work with me or aren't my mother, know a little about where I am coming from on the tech side.

The Early Years
I was a pretty typical bored teenager in the early eighties. Little did I know the foundation was being laid for my delusions of greatness. As the Atari console and the Apple II started making inroads in my neighborhood, my parents made a great decision. Rather than by a game system, they bought a TRS-80 Color Computer and I found myself introduced to the wonderful world of BASIC.

Like many of my generation, my teenage dream was to write video games. After copying line-by-line the sample programs in the hobbyist magazines I started trying to write a Zork clone. In case you are not familiar with Zork, it was a text based 'dungeon' game with an excellent natural language processor. At the time I had no idea what NLP was, but I thought the idea of writing a choose your own adventure type game would be cool. Mine was obviously less sophisticated. Rather than typing in your actions or queries it presented a narrative and then a few options from which you could choose.

My game authoring career came to a quick end one Sunday morning. After several hours of coding I went to save the program to a cassette tape. Ten minutes later, after saving and restarting, I tried to read my program from the tape and nothing. I yanked the tape out of the recorder and threw it across our family room into my bedroom. Then I walked in there and slammed the door so hard it broke and my dad had to come down and jimmy it for me to get out.

In high school I found myself interested in the electronics courses, and did a little pc board design, built an audio amplifier and some other neat little electronic gadgets. But other than Parsec on the home computer and Tempest in the entryway of the local grocery store, my interaction with computers was pretty slim until I entered college...