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Moving Jobs

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:35:00 GMT

Today is my last day at Interfolio and ends an overall very happy chapter in my career. I have become a better programmer, learnt an awlful lot and had many great experiences. I leave behind a very talented technical team (Dominic O'Connor, Jon Dowdle and Rachel Lehman) who I'm confident will continue to turn out cool new product enhancements.

I am moving on to become a consultant at WebFirst working at the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Its an exciting opportunity working with ColdFusion 9 and Flex. The former I can't wait to really sink my teeth into while the later I've been wanting to learn for years so am looking forward to getting the chance.

Saving my Eyes (Cool Mac Trick)

Wed, 14 May 2008 12:47:00 GMT

I have pretty good vision and even as I approach my mid-30's do not need glasses or contact lenses. All is not peachy though -- reading light text on dark backgrounds causes me pain about a paragraph or two into reading an article.

A solution, which a friend recently pointed out to me, is to 'Reverse black and white' as Apple calls it by holding down crtl+option+command+8. As you have probably worked out this switches the black and white and allows me to read entries without my eyes hurting.

I tried taking a screenshot but Apple takes a screenshot of the orginal settings not the reversed.

Why I Use Instantspot aka My Decision to Use Not Just Write Software

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:29:00 GMT

A little before I started this blog I realized I did not use web software for anything important to me. Sure, I used web mail (both GMail and Yahoo Mail) and paid bills online and read alot online but there was nothing really important to me that I used the web for.

At the same time I had just started with Interfolio and my salary became dependent on people wanting to pay for our software and services so it seemed that I should do likewise. As I am not applying to college I could not really eat my own dog food but I knew a blog would have be important to me and I if I could I would constantly tweak it. I decided to go with a hosting service.

So I picked Instantspot because of its features but also because I wanted to experience the joy, the frustration and all the other feelings of using software. Fortunately Instantspot is pretty damn good so I have way more joy than frustration but there are definitely times when I have thought, "with x tag or function I could tweak y to do z". I know at some point I would have tried to incorporate AJAX comments on my own blog. Instead I have tried to provide constructive feedback from time to time to Dave and Aaron.

Overall, not being able to do tweak my own blog and to experience using web software has been a very good thing for me.

A quick word on Instantspot 2: Its very good and the use of AJAX done in a very thoughtful way. If you would like an Instantspot invite let me know in the comments or use the Contact Form on the right. I have 5 to give out.

A quick word on the new look: I created the image with ColdFusion and reflected it with a function writen by Dave Ferguson. Thanks Dave!

Who I Am

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 19:14:01 GMT

During soccer pre-season in the sweltering Florida summer heat of 1995 I gave my soccer coach a hard time that the MIT team had a "world wide web" page as we where both small time computer geeks. The next day my assignment was to create a "world wide web" page. Back then such a task was a little harder than today and meant editing html in plain text and eventually an editor whose name now escapes me. I ended up working for a number of Rollins College departments on campus thoroughly enjoyed it and earned enough money that I decided to turn it into a career when I graduated (over my ended path in healthcare management -- a lucky break).

And so in the summer of 1997 I moved to Washington, DC to work on a government contract. There I learnt Perl and worked on a Solaris machine. A year later I moved to work at Intelix and began my connection with ColdFusion -- and the language had me at cfquery! Quite seriously the hassle and difficulty in writing a query in Perl made ColdFusion a pleasure. Programming wise I have really grown up and matured as ColdFusion has. I took an Object-Oriented Programming Theory class at Johns Hopkins just before ColdFusion MX and with it ColdFusion Components (cfc's) came out. I've certainly seen the light in regards to OO programming and enjoy wrestling with it.

I've done a fair amount of JavaScript, even writing a rich-ish internet application back in 2002, been certified in ColdFusion and Oracle and done a good amount of SQL. Along the way I've dabled with Java, JSP and PHP but frankly always found it hard to get excited about another programming langauge that takes longer to do something than CF. I've been to training, conferences and read books on virtually all of those topics but the biggest help I've gotten has been from some great colleagues along the way especially at Intelix though the only one blogging, I believe, is Dave Carabetta .

Since Intelix I have worked at two associations AAMC and ASEE and after a brief stint as a government contractor I am now working for Interfolio . Its a small, fast-growing company and I am enjoying it.

The First Post

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:59:53 GMT

The first post. I've decided to start a blog primarily because I like writing. And having been a programmer for the last 10 years I haven't written much during that time. I also realize I like writing about technical issues and have a fair amount on my mind at the moment so it seems like a good time to start a blog. Note, I did not say I was a grammatically correct writer. So, expect the odd typo and grammatically incorrect sentence from time to time. This is a blog and I'm not going to use the grammar corrector in Word before posting.

I am also intrigued by social networking so InstantSpot seemed a good spot (pun intended) to start my blog.

I aim to cover a bunch of topics, some tutorials and explanations of basic ColdFusion functionality, thoughts on the future of the web and ColdFusion, conferences, and anything else that comes up. I will mostly be focusing on ColdFusion (and will probably start using cf as an abbreviation real soon) though I do hope to post on other non-cf topics like JavaScript, MySQL and databases in general and who knows what else in the future.

I am not going to aim to publish on a regular basis and have pledged to keep this blog a purely non-work time activity. I'm busy enough there anyway. Good busy. I also don't believe blogs die. So if I have nothing good or interesting to say I will say nothing. I also don't think this will turn into a news blog with short entries and links to the latest news. There are enough of those, and, I rely on them for my tech-news as much as anywhere else. In short, if you like what you are reading I suggest using the RSS feeds or subscribing over email.

More to come...