Languages and Skills Focus

Over the breadth of projects and companies I've worked for, there have been times to apply a wide range of skills, both hard and soft. This page provides an index that focuses around those skills. Each area heading will give the number of years, my own opinion of my skill level, and a brief overview of my experiences. Click the read more... link to dig further into that skill area.

Soft Skills

These are all those skills apart from hard production.

UML, Architecture and Design Skills

10 Years, Expert
Since I came into design before code, in that wierd way, my analysis and design skills have been a part of most of engagements to this point. Leveraging analysis allowed MediaRewards to come to market six months faster than predicted, Thinking Economics to re-use content for multiple targets and CallPrint to move from a simple web site to a web service interacting with browsers, devices, SMS routers and more.

My focus on Objects as the focusing metaphor for design has driven simplification to shorten development cycles. At AbleCommerce taking the time to architect, over the urgent objections of the less experienced owner, simplified CommerceBuilder from more than 1,000 separate modules to a unified set of libraries. The fun thing here is that it was built in ColdFusion, a language with absolutely no support for objects. :) Designing this way, though we sat thinking it through for several nervous weeks, cut months off the product's time line.

Process and Configuration Management

4 Years, Advanced
Design often enables better team organization and project management. The issues that configuration management (version control, build process and such) raises require good design to answer. This is a mixed heading, in some ways, since planning and coordinating for good project and development management, as well as the hard skills involved in implementation and deployment of PVCS, CVS and other configuration management tools.

Teaching and Mentoring Skills

20+ Years, Always Learning
I've been teaching since age 15, first in music teaching steel string, jazz and classical guitar and music theory and later in church settings. Communication and instruction have been a part of my life.

It's grown considerably in my professional life training users around the country with Techniflex, at Merant first on the phone and then training on site and all the way to my year teaching at Washington State University's Vancouver campus.

Hard Skills

These are the skills I've applied hands-on in building products.

Server Development Tools

My focus in hands-on development for the last five years or so has been the server tiers, whether web, application or database server coding. There are a host of technologies applied at these tiers depending on many factors, some technical, most related cultural or bias issues.

Ruby and RoR

2+ Years
I got interested in Ruby thru Squeak discussions. Later I learned about the power of the Ruby on Rails framework and built two small projects with it. When I arrived at CAESY, I included Rails in the set of languages to consider in our rewrite of the Edge Server. Rails was chosen and I worked with my team over the last two years building a high-availability content management system in the tool.

Python and Zope

5 Years, Expert
My most recent projects have been urgent (frantic! insane!) startups in which time-to-market was the absolute king. In keeping with a number of studies, python was the best pick to build CallPrint, MediaRewards and TelcoVault far faster than they could have been built in Java or PHP.

PHP and ColdFusion

4 Years, Advanced
AbleCommerce was built in ColdFusion and some of my experiments in preparation were seen by Allaire as (and I quote) "far beyond anything we envisioned" as I tied WSDL, JavaScript and data together for a dynamic page layout tool.

Built a bug tracking and customer support application from scratch in PHP and deployed that internally at imPressive solutions and later for support at Able. I've trained two classes and two teams in PHP projects that I architected and directed and yes, we used the PEAR standard as it formed.

.NET and C#

1 Years
For some projects and customers, the established platforms decisions are the primary concern, overriding development time and cost. To support projects at Accent Business Services, I obtained my Microsoft certification in ASP .Net and C# with SQL Server.

SQL

8 Years, Expert
SQL, as a skill, has always been ignored when I catalog my skills. :-) It was just that basic a skill that I just thought it would be assumed that any application developer would have a solid understanding of SQL. Yes, I've done stored procedures and triggers in Oracle and SQL Server, but most of the time my SQL has been embedded in the languages (python, coldfusion, etc) in use at the time. Here are some links to the projects that incorporated SQL, but it's basically every project I've done.

Java

6 Years, Intermediate
Visual Age for Java, in the very early days of Java's life, Java applets and later on in servlets, I've worked with Java at the architect level. Several small example applications and some components to get beyond issues posed in AbleCommerce for example.

Client-Oriented Tools

C++ and Delphi

Pagination from Techniflex in C++ and the imPressive solutions application in Delphi, both for the publishing industry were very heavy-client applications.

Smalltalk

I worked with IBM in Visual Age Smalltalk, Digitalk in Smalltalk/V's Team/V in adding Configuration Management Capability to their smalltalk environments. read more...

Newtonscript (no seriously!) on Handhelds

Working on DietLog and Pointpro taught me an enormous amount about the challenges of delivering solutions on a limited amount of screen real estate and small resources.