I’ve toyed with a few titles for this post, including - ‘My Kingdom for a Backslash’, or ‘Fish Don’t Know They’re in Water’. In the end I felt ‘The Long Road /home’ was the most fitting. This post is about my thoughts and experiences as a software developer, leading up to my use of Linux and building my first non-Microsoft based Web application.

In The Beginning

I’m a non-CompSci grad, having started my academic life with a college diploma in biology (a Canadian community college is the equivalent to what would have been called a ‘polytechnic’ in the UK). After about four years of working as a laboratory assistant I decided that biology wasn’t for me and moved into IT. I started the hard way – PC support, and slowly worked my way up from there. I had a couple of lucky breaks along the way, which combined with a lot of work meant that I was eventually able to pass for a nearly competent IT professional.

I’ve been doing some research on storage options for a media company who are in desperate need of an easy-to-use, safe and large capacity storage solution. I spent the best part of a week looking at various offerings, when it became clear that LTO and LTFS were going to hit the sweet spot. The LTO specification is currently at LTO-5 – which provides 1.5 TB of uncompressed storage to the linear tape format and data transfer speeds of up to 140MB per second. Impressive.

I’ve been an IEEE and Computer Society member for a couple of years now. Trying to keep up with the IEEE publications along with my RSS Reader and tech news has been a challenge – so I’m sure I’ve missed some good stuff along the way. However, an article in the September 2009 edition of ‘Computer’ caught my eye: “Formal Versus Agile: Survival of the Fittest” by Sue Black, Paul P. Boca, Jonathan P. Bowan, Jason Gorman and Mike Hinchey.

Update: 28-11-2008 - Microsoft have released an update - v3 of the SDL Threat Modelling Tool - which is DFD based as opposed to use case driven.

UPDATE: 01/09/2008 - Met some people from Reuters at BarCamp Bangkok over the weekend. They were describing their frustration at having been forced to use SharePoint to build an external community and social networking site for financial analysts. I think I can see why they'd be frustrated with the choice.

I learn something new nearly every time I write code - whether in a small project or large. I recently updated my online gallery component at http://www.58bits.com/otherblog/photos/home.aspx. One of my TODO: items was a rewrite of a VCR style pager I've used previously. What I wanted was a style like the one shown in the screen shot...

I wrote earlier about my experiences using the Application Block Software Factory to create a new Application Block and Provider - it started well - and creating my first provider went fine. Putting things into production was a slightly different matter. Again the docs are thin - and it took a brief email exchange between myself, Tom Hollander and Fernando Simonazzi of Clarius Consulting to solve one problem I came unstuck with (no doubt attributed mainly to my first crack at ObjectBuilder and ABSF).

NOTE - see Part Two of this article here...
I've recently been working on a component for a client that requires several implementations of a base class and interface including internal class dependencies.