I graduated college in 1996. This was a great year for me. I moved home where I was fed and loved by my family. I worked for a small software company doing Visual Cobol who went bust. I was a hard worker and never said no to an opportunity. When the company went bust, I worked at a local concrete factory until I got into a factory automation job. Now I am where I am and boy did I learn a lot. Some of what I learned is from making mistakes and some I learned by mentors and leaders in my life. Continue reading What I Have Learned
Welcome to London Ontario
Hey London; We live in a great city. We are full of excitement, technology, festivals, markets and home of some of the best mom and pop restaurants. Continue reading Welcome to London Ontario
IT Professional and Communication Skills
It is a well-known fact that Information Technology professionals are often lacking skills in the communication department. Almost every job posting lately had stated you must have good Oral and Written communication skills. This was not me; at least until recent. I was always the guy standing by the punch bowl or snack table with hands in the pockets that said “HEY” as people walked by. IT professionals often confuse colleagues, friends and customers with their acronyms and tech-lingo – I was one of these people. Then I was pulled out to a Toastmasters meeting. Continue reading IT Professional and Communication Skills
Giving Back
It is important to give back to the community in some way. Your community may vary from other people’s, but it is a great way to create awareness of charities you believe in, your company’s good deeds and create balance and fun for your employees. Giving back also shows your employees the importance of supporting local charities and groups. Continue reading Giving Back
More Than Meets The Eye
There is more than meets the eye with me. On my resume it is majority Microsoft skills. Microsoft is used more than open source because that is what my work and customers demand from me. Can I do more? Yes! I have experience in a lot of open technologies such as PHP, MySQL, Python and more. I do use these technologies, but not often Continue reading More Than Meets The Eye
Do Not Forget The Customers
New developers often design and develop what they believe is cool and cutting edge. What is forgotten is how the customer or the user will think about the experience. If the customer or user refuses to accept what you have built, you have just wasted time and money. Potentially you are out of business. Continue reading Do Not Forget The Customers
Do I Need Source Control
Yes! For the first time in my 15-year career I had experienced what it is like to not have source control, and I had hated it. I had lost a very difficult to write SQL statement in a project. It seemed almost impossible to rewrite the SQL for the second time. I believe it was two of us working in the same project that had caused this loss of code. I take the blame because I am the manager and I knew that source control was not implemented. I should have taken the time to take all of the projects and check them into the source control system. Continue reading Do I Need Source Control
Development Servers
What is a development server?
A development server is either a physical or virtual computer that is dedicated to the art of software or web development activities. It should be as close to being the same as the published web or software as possible with the exceptions of having the changes that you are working on.
SQL Pagination
I have often encountered the culture of query for thousands of results, estimate the paging and then only display a small segment of the results that were retrieved from the database. This is particularly bad in a web environment. This results in the following issues:
- A large amount of data to be transferred from the database to the website
- Longer than necessary database queries
- Script Errors and timeouts
- Frustrated users/customers