Continuing Education

have been an actively employed developer for almost 15 years now. I started my career in Oregon as a developer for a small property management company. I later moved to a resort, to a government contractor (CSC), to an infomercial company (The JuiceMan), to a software/newsletter publisher, and finally as a consultant. I always think back to the moment when I really hit my stride as a developer. It was at the infomercial company. When I was hired my manager told me that I would be working with the best programmers he could find in all of Seattle. This was a very intriguing statement and I was excited to take the job.

When I started there I went to work with Eric Ranft, Scott Kirk, and later Mark Davis. In a year and a half we created one of (what I consider) the best order entry/fulfillment applications ever created for a DOS platform. And you know that these guys were pretty good developers. This one job is where I learned how to create very user friendly, scalable, and powerful applications (all on 386 diskless workstations no less). The real learning experience came from the other developers. We worked as a team, not a figurative one, but a real one. We challenged each other to do better work, we sometimes worked around the clock and sometime we simply had fun at a basketball game or shooting pool. This was one of the BEST times I ever had developing software.