I'm interested in software development. It started with QuickBASIC in 1990, then dabbling in Web technology after discovering Mozilla in 1995, and really getting hooked with Office VBA in 1997. I remember some excitement at the release of Visual Basic 4 and Windows NT 4. Sometime after that I attempted to learn C and C++ on various occasions, but no C-style language really appealed to me until C# and the .NET Framework came along. Prior to that I had spent many hours trying to understand the intricacies of Microsoft's Component Object Model so that I could do more interesting things with Visual Basic. There were many mornings spent at my local cafe reading Dan Appleman when I probably should've been working on producing deposition transcripts for my job as a freelance court reporter. However, on the upside, I had managed to create my own computer-aided transcription software which worked well for me in my job as a court reporter.

Although it was a bit disappointing that I had spent so much time learning to do object-oriented programming with Visual Basic only to have something totally new come along, I found that the learning curve for doing .NET programming was fairly gentle. The .NET wrappers around all of the most important Windows APIs were fascinating and opened up the same capabilities that I had been seeking through the use Lib statements and COM references in "classic" Visual Basic.

I suppose that computer programming appeals to me in the same way that playing music does, and my musical aptitudes seem to have served me well in it. After running my own court reporting school for about six months and finding myself broke and lacking direction, I managed to get involved in oil and gas title work and quickly applied my software development skills to that. It was in that environment that I managed to create a Website which used ASP.NET and a SQL Server back-end database to display complex mineral ownership data.

To be continued...