Hello there

Howdy!

Jeff here.  I'm a coder.  Hard to believe because I always thought I'd be an astronaut (silly dreams these 5 year olds have) but I stumbled into the tech field over 25 years ago and have grown to really love coding.  So, no complaints here... based on my family ancestry, I could have been in a coal mine.

Historically I code mainly on the Microsoft stack because that is what a lot of our customers tend to have in their enterprise (Windows PCs and Windows servers). As a result my focus over the past 15 years has been rattling around within ASP.NET environment (VB.NET and C#) and coding in SQL and tuning SQL engines such as SQL Server and Oracle.  These aren't exactly bleeding edge but they provide a mature framework for creating production systems running at hundreds of customer sites.  In other words, its a living.  I am an expert on none but capable on all.

In the last few years, my focus has been moving towards more modern technologies such as Javascript frameworks (jQuery, but also reviewing Angular, React, etc) and getting away from the stale tasting server-side coding model of ASP.NET.  I have also enjoyed coding some small scale Bootstrap based pages that are responsive on all clients. Cloud servers and Azure are also a part time musing.

We are also trying to fully implement Agile/XP at the workplace. We have the beginnings of a TDD mentality but we need to automate it more from the manual system we have today.  We adopted the  concept of CI using Jenkins but we need to tie in the testing into the CI pipeline better and we need to towards the goal of Continuous Delivery and up the pace a bit.  We have automated testing in place using Telerik Test Studio but we are hounded by its finicky nature and high cost and intend to dump that in favor of Katalon and Selenium.

Going forward, I'm going to blog on whatever comes to mind.  It will probably be a case study of something neato I discovered roughly in the areas described above.  But whatever the topic is, this blog will be a potpouri of coding tips, hacks and bodges.  If one person gets a benefit from this area, I guess its all worthwhile.  Worst case is I will have a place to refer back to once I forget what I have done.

When I am not coding I am traveling or walking dogs with my wife, riding bicycles or snowboards, at the dojo or settling in for the night with a malted beverage infused with lupulin.  Cheers.