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 I guess it's about time to jump into the blog-o-sphere. I've read plenty of blogs, most of them technical, and have always wanted to participate in my own. Whether I write anything of value remains to be seen.
A little background, I guess.... I'm the Director of Information Technology for a small game company in southern California, but I've been around computers my whole life. I started programming in high-school up until I got out of the Navy. Since then, all of my career opportunites have been on the network engineering side of the house....firewalls, routers and switches, NetWare, Windows, Linux and Solaris....It's what I do.
Programming is still my passion. Nothing feels better than when I'm coding, but you have to go where the money is I guess. That brings us here. DataTek software is the place that I hope to share the software that I've created. Nothing usable at the moment....everything seems to be a work in progress all the time. Whenever I see a program that doesn't work just the way I'd like, I feel like I want to try creating something better. Having worked on and managed IT Help Desks for many years, I came to the realization that there isn't a single Incident Support package that could do everything that I wanted for the price that I could handle. So I decided to start writing my own. I want it to be a drop-in replacement for the TrackIT! Help Desk module, but with additional features like workflow, rules-based data validation, granular security and support for plug-ins. Working with websites in the past led me to vBulletin. Simply the most advanced message board available for PHP/mySQL websites. You could build entire websites using this software as a framework. Their templating system is second to none. The only thing that I needed was a decent editor to work with these templates. I needed a Windows editor that could connect directly to the template system via web services (so it could work with any website). It had to have syntax highlighting, support PHP files and built-in FTP client for ease of deployment. vTemplates was born. It's coming along, just not as quickly as I'd like. I guess the biggest development project that I've been involved with is Unreal Playground. We had a great HTML/graphics guy and a staff that any website would kill for. People who were passionate about the game (Unreal Tournament), wanted to have fun ... and could act like adults most of the time. All I had to do was pump out PHP code day in and day out. They made it easy. I'm not involved with UP anymore. It got to be a lot of work so I took a month off and we started another site. It got to be too expensive so now we've just got a message board and most of the original UP'ers check in from time to time. Well that's my first blog post. Hopefully I can keep this up. "If your life is worth living, it's worth recording." |
