I’ve had a blog site online for quite a while. I think it’s been something like 10 years now. I never spent a lot of time writing here, and really only used it to showcase some of my mobile app projects.
Well, that’s going to be changing. Starting today, I will be focusing this blog on sharing some of the things I’ve learned over decades of developing software.
One key benefit to sharing my past work is that I can start to have a nice demo portfolio online for folks to see. One of the challenges of interviewing today is that everyone wants to see your code online. Some short sighted interviewers don’t realize that there is a LOT of software written that doesn’t end up being used by the general public. Or software that was online at one point and has since been removed. The vast majority of the software I’ve ever written is internal corporate software. Or, it’s the guts of a system that powers a public facing system. So, there’s nothing to “show”, really.
For example, one such system I wrote years ago at Southwest Gas was a system integration between their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) call system and their backend mainframes and databases. My code was used to connect callers to their accounts so they could get their payment, balance and other information via the phone. This system handled ~2 million requests per month flawlessly. So, yeah its a cool system, but unless you’re a natural gas customer in the US southwest, you’d never be able to see or use it.
Anyway, more to come in the future. I am going to do my best to make this a useful blog for developers and folks curious about software in general. Stay tuned!