Hi, my name is Sam Yates and I’ll be your host in this tiny little sliver of the blogosphere. You may occasionally see posts from other contributors if I can convince anyone it’s worth spending time one, but for the most part when you see first-person pronouns sprinkled through the blog you can assume said person is me.
I’ve been doing IT work for about 13 years now (with a brief pause for some grad school work + part time consulting), which conveniently happens to coincide pretty nicely with the time that a lot of companies started to take this notice this newfangled world wide web thing and take it seriously. Consequently, even though I have done some work on non-web based systems, the overwhelming majority of them have had at least some web component. That probably seems pretty normal now, but every once in a while I bump into a weird gap in my knowledge that some of my colleagues who spent a lot more time in the “client-server” (or even mainframe) days assume everyone dealt with. Or, more commonly, I spend time trying to get people to think about things in a webby way that seems so foreign to them, but probably second nature to anyone whose career lines up along a similar time frame.
Not all of this time has been spent in the Microsoft world. In fact, I’m sure I’ve still written more lines of code in Java then in all the MS-related languages combined. That may have something to do with the fact that in many Microsoft environments you don’t need to crank out tons of lines of code, but it also means that I don’t run screaming from the likes of J2EE, Unix/Linux, shell scripts, and even vi. Emacs on the other hand has been known to cause me to shiver and break out in a cold sweat.
These days though it seems Microsoft is doing quite well in their quest to complete dominate the enterprise software world, and as such there is more and more software in my life that started out in Redmond. Frankly, that’s probably a good thing – they make a lot of great stuff.
Mostly I throw these semi-random tidbits out there not so much for anyone to start thinking I’m great/evil/whatever, but to help explain some of the filter through which the stuff that gets written through is passed before it makes it to the page.
