Maggie++

There are several posts (e.g. Joel’s here and Jeremy’s here) about the new SharePoint Master Certification and the debate over it reinforces my decision to stop pursuing SharePoint at the present time. 

So, this blog post is about my brief dive into all that is SharePoint.  A little history:  I became a consultant early last year and one focus was going to be learning SharePoint.  I ended up being assigned to a C++ unmanaged project (a whole different story) and dove into learning C++, MFC, ATL and COM instead.

When I became ATO (at-the office or on-the-bench) this summer, I took the time to pick up SharePoint.  I began attending all of the sessions (at code camps such as CodeStock, devLink, and IndyTechFest) that I could to learn from SharePoint MVPs.  I read many books, listened to podcasts, did hands-on-labs and watched many training webcasts.

Since I have a background in Document Management and Imaging and a huge interest in search, libraries (book kind) and improving user interactions, I really liked what I saw.  I saw SharePoint as a good platform to further my development skills as well as bring the information architecture into the fold.

I studied and passed the Moss application development exam and wrote a few connectible web parts to help out colleagues.   I did not pursue configuration exams since I did not want to be pegged an IT/Infrastructure person (since I’m not).  The more I talked to consultants doing SharePoint locally, the more it became apparent that there is little custom development at the current time (at my employer and location) and that much infrastructure knowledge is needed.  In order to excel at this type of job, I would need to work with an experienced team for some time to develop those skills.  Something a client would not be willing to pay for.

As I love software much more than hardware,  I decided that SharePoint was not where I wanted to be at this time since I would rather be learning advanced development (patterns, AOOP, TDD) and upcoming technologies (WCF, Linq, WF, WPF) with my time.

I am now working for a client on YACPPP (yet another C++ project).  I am just getting started but have been told the code base is well designed in a OOP type of way – so I am anxious to learn how it is architected, see the code  and dive back into C++ (there is much new (for me) to learn in this older technology) .  On the side I am going to learn how to be a better developer in the other areas mentioned.

So SharePoint is out of my thoughts for now, possibly in the future I’ll attack it again when I can from a development angle.  The best part about SharePoint is the community.  I am astonished at the hundreds of SharePoint bloggers working to share what they have learned and the passion I see many have around SharePoint.   All of the SP experts I have met, such as Rob Bogue, Doug Ware, and Rob Foster have been great and  I will keep my eye out on twitter to follow the SharePoint (r) evolution.

maggie++

My first entrance to my programming career is described in How I got started in Programming and leaving to be a full-time SAHM (stay-at-home-mom) in Taking an off-ramp and an on-ramp in IT.  This post will attempt to describe what steps I took to re-enter the workforce.

We were living in Kingsport, TN  in 2001 when I started to think about returning to work.  I felt the first thing I should learn was where the programming profession was;  I knew it had to be radically different from when I left in 1990. At the time I did not know anyone there who worked in software or anything remotely similar.

[2001 -2002] I started a subscription to Dr Dobb's Journal and searched on the internet to find anything I could to learn about software; I did not really know what I was looking for. I joined the internet forum Systers and scoured the library for technical books.  I purchased Microsoft Visual C++ .NET Deluxe Learning Edition and 4 flavors of Java in a NutShell.  I completed the tutorials in both languages.  Additional books I bought and read during this time included:

• The Pragmatic Programmer

• The Humane Interface

• The Practice of Programming

• Design Patterns Explained
  

[2003] We moved to Cincinnati, OH both to live near some family and to obtain better educations for our children.  We wanted our son to attend my husband's alma mater, St Xavier High School, and we wanted choices for my daughter for middle school.  Moving and building a house took most of my energies that first year. I continued to read and search the net and visited the library and read books such as Code Complete, The Mythical Man-Month and a variety of books on Extreme Programming.  I Joined the Cincinnati Programmer's Guild and The Women's Circuit.  I attended meetings for both groups and started to meet "real-live" people that worked in the industry and was exposed to a very wide variety of topics and ideas. 

[ 2004] By 2004 I was starting to gain confidence in my software abilities.  I started looking at job advertisements all over the internet. I determined that there seemed to be more .NET jobs than Java in Cincinnati so I started to narrow in my focus on .NET.  I discovered C# and spent a fortune on books including:

• Programming Microsoft .NET Core Services

• Programming Microsoft .NET XML Web Services

• Network Programming for Microsoft Windows

• Domain-Driven Design

• The Unified Modeling Language User Guide

• About Face

• C# Cookbook

• C# in a Nutshell

• Head First Design Patterns

I wanted to take some college or graduate classes but was disappointed to find out that you had to apply for a degree in order to take a class.  I did not want to pursue a degree at that time as I already had a math degree and had completed all of the coursework for a MSCS.  I knew my job search would be difficult considering it had been a very long time since I had been employed and I wanted to prepare myself as best I could. Taking classes was the only way I knew to "prove" on my resume that I had skills. So during the summer I took C# and Relational Databases with SQL classes at the community college.  I really learned nothing new about either C# or relational databases.  The biggest value in the classes was exposure to using Visual Studio and SQL Server software as well as being able to ask questions of the instructors.

I then paid for a week-long training class "Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Web Applications using Visual Studio .NET".  This course was great as it introduced me to ASP.NET, ADO.NET, IIS, Web Forms, Web Applications and XML Web Services and also taught me how to use more features of Visual Studio.  I also learned much from the questions the other students asked as they were all employed and transitioning from asp to ASP.NET programming.

Once the Cincinnati .NET User's Group started in the end of 2004 I began attending and was happy to see many familiar faces from the programmer's guild.

Once I updated my resume with these recent skills I began to see a sharp increase of interest and started going to interviews. The interview
 process is time of growth. I started out extremely nervous but each one got better.  Once I was able to see for myself how many different companies opperated and managed software I knew more about what to ask and what to look for.  I was able to refine my resume, read the job postings with more knowledge and was able to write detailed direct cover letters that got me in the door.  In March of 2005 I started work for a small micro-film/imaging company on a C# Tablet PC application. 

I absolutely loved being back at work. It was a long journey but very much worth the effort.

maggie++

Michael Eaton has requested developers to share stories of how they got started in programming.  I started programming in the dark ages which many of you will not be able to relate to, so bear with me.

First of all, when I was a child no one had computers in their homes.  The only computers I knew about were at the universities and the government.  When I was in junior high, my school decided that it needed to give more focus on math and reading so it established a new format for Fridays.  Half the day was for math and half was for reading - this was set up to ensure everyone knew the basics.  Well those of us who were advanced past the basics got to hang out with the social studies teacher and learn fun things; I think there were about 10 of us.  He taught us Algebra and Geometry, we put on a play, learned about Fibonacci and many other cool things. 

Best of all he had access to a computer as he was taking graduate school classes at the nearby university.  He taught us the BASIC instruction set and had us write out programs on loose leaf.  At night he would go to the computer lab, type in each of our programs and bring us back the results.  This was the most fun I can remember from grade school.  Math was always my favorite subject and I loved puzzles and problem solving.  I don't remember too many specifics about the programs except I recall something with biorhythms and calculating things like how many days we had been alive.

My high school had a teleprinter with a tape in our math center.   I never had a chance to learn how to use it.  I envied my older sister who took an independent study class and got to (that she had a programmable TI calculator is another story).

My chance to program for real was in college.  I majored in Math and started taking computer science classes right away for a minor (at the time the college did not offer a major in CS).  We did not have our own computer, instead we had time-sharing with the mainframes at the University of Maryland. I learned assembler, Fortran, COBOL and Pascal.  Assembler and Fortran were coded with a line editor on a teleprinter; COBOL required punch cards and by the time I took Pascal we had CRT's - The summer before my senior year I had a mathematics summer internship at COMSAT Laboratory where my job was to write a program in Pascal to compute an algorithm for a mathematician.  The first day he gave me a 23 page hand written integral which was my assignment for the summer.  COMSAT was exciting - this is the first place I had ever seen real computers, plus they had a huge (satellite-sized) anechoic chamber, earth stations, library, and tons of special purpose electronics and engineering systems. 

The important things that happened that summer were I discovered that the mathematicians did not use computers at all, there was a lot of money to be made writing software and I met my future husband who was a RF Engineering Co-op.  The first didn't end up being true but the other two were good.

Once I graduated, I started job hunting.  I had success at my first job fair.  I walked around the room and talked to all the men and one asked me if I knew assembler.  I said yes I knew Univac Assembler, he smiled, gave me a business card and set up an interview for me.  I looked up and saw that the company he worked for was Sperry Univac.  I started work right away.  We were a subcontractor for Ford Aerospace on a NASA contract.  I worked on a 16 bit (hex) mini-computer with ASCII and two's complement arithmetic and communicated with a 36 bit (used octal) mainframe that used 6 bit Fieldata and one's complement arithmetic.  Needless to say I learned a ton, met great people and saw a successful large project installation.

The most fun I had at that job was testing in the lab with the mini-computer.  I loved being able to toggle switches to set a breakpoint and look at indicator lights (the only UI) to read the register contents and memory, following along with a printout of the assembler code with addresses and the op-codes.  I liked making up  and applying patches on the fly when I found a bug. A also liked getting a memory dump of the processor and searching through the buffer pool looking for buffers that hadn't been returned and ones that overwrote their boundaries.  I had full control of the machine and yes I am a geek.  I still eally like debugging - yes I know 'm a geek.

At the same job the boss felt it was important not to work through lunch so we played bridge, then when Trivial Pursuit became popular and we had more people we played that.  Some days we just hung out at the terminals and played zork.

Ok, enough with history and back to the questions.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

At least 5 assembler languages, BASIC, meta-assembler, Fortran, Pascal, Smalltalk, Prolog, Lisp, C, Cocoa, Java, C#, and C++.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Absolutely.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be? 

Don't stay at a job you hate with people you don't admire.  You want to be in a group where learning and communications are encouraged and required.

 

maggie++