About

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Me

I have been a mobile DJ, a landlord, a bar owner, and now a programmer, but the best thing I have ever been is a dad. I returned to college after several attempts at other professions to be a programmer. Currently I am an Applications Developer for a local university. I love to learn new technologies and my current position allows for me to learn and experiment with new things. I am also a teacher. Teaching part time at a local college is something I enjoy every minute of. One of my previous employers missions was to “Make a Difference in Someone’s Life”. Every day I try to Make a Difference, no matter how small. Teaching lets me make a difference and help someone achieve their goals and dreams.

I am sure that everyone has researched for hours on how to do something, write some bit of code that will help them, or just lessons that we have learned in life. These are the things that we don’t do all the time if we did we wouldn’t need to write them down. They are the how do I setup a new development machine, or how do I set up source control. Others may include a specific way to complete a task. After working in the programming world for a few months I discovered there were things that I had figured out how to do and always counted on that I would have the code to refer back to. I then had to find another job. That code base was lost. Well at least the stuff I could not remember.

Goal

I wanted a way to keep that code base, and take it with me where ever I went. I’m not posting specific proprietary stuff. Just how to do simple things with short pieces of code. I started this blog to accomplish this one simple goal. I know what you are saying that, “you can find this stuff all over the internet” and you would be right. A lot of what I post you will find it by doing a simple search. But often times I have found a reason for doing it a particular way and that I will include in the post. Another reason is I don’t want to wade through the depths of a search to find the way I did something three years ago.

Finally there are a ton of ways to do something. Often I have put time into finding the “best practices” way or the way I feel would be less dependent on someone else’s plugin. Not that I am against a plugin, I am not into reinventing the wheel, but I have also learned in the last years that relying on someone else can get you into trouble quickly.  I also gain the added benefit of learning how a plugin works but creating something similar on my own.

So there you have it. This is what I am learning now and into the future. I will post things that pertain to what I am doing at work and my personal projects so others can learn from the experience and I have a reference library for myself.

I encourage everyone to post comments on better ways to do things so we can all learn.

Thanks and enjoy.

Andy