Educational Background
Overland Park, KS
In the mid 1980s, I was studying Mechanical Engineering at
The University of Missouri-Kansas City.
As part of my classes, we were required to write programs to automate some calculations.
I then decided that Engineers could be required to program as part of their profession.
I went to JCCC to take some computer programming classes to get a better feel for
this emerging technology. Instead of taking a class in programming BASIC,
I took the introductory classes in Computer Science, including Discrete Math and
Data Structures. Even though Pascal was the language of choice in education
at the time, I also took classes in the C programming language. Then
I decided I enjoyed programming more than I enjoyed Mechanical Engineering, so I
went to the University of Kansas to complete a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer
Science.
Since computer technology is constantly changing, I went
 back to JCCC in 2001 to update in the industry.
I took courses in C++, Access Database development and was introduced to the
emerging .NET technology. I also concentrated on learning Java. While
enrolled in Java classes, I was pointed towards the Eclipse Project by a coworker
as a Java Development Tool. Eclipse in my opinion was the best editor
for programming Java. I introduced it to my Java instructor. At this
time, I should have prepared for and completed my certifications for the Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP). I plan to go
back and get this certification, in the future.
JCCC is an excellent community college. I received such a good education at
JCCC, before I went to KU, I was ahead of my peers who took the same prep at KU.
The instructors at JCCC are dedicated to higher learning. When I went back there
to update my skills, I found the same care by the instructors, as before.
Lawrence, KS
While working full-time at Honeywell
in Kansas City, Missouri,
 I also attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence
studying Computer Science. I carried a minimum of 6 hours to a maximum of
12 hours a semester while attending KU. A typical day for me was to leave
my house about 7:00 in the morning, drive 30 minutes to Lawrence to attend classes.
About 2:30, I would drive 45 minutes to South Kansas City to put in 8.5 hours of
work. I would get off work at midnight and head home to sleep. In the
meantime I maintained over a 3.0 GPA in my core courses at KU. Advanced Data
Structures, Theory of Automata, Programming Languages, Compuler Construction, Operating
Systems, Database Management, and Knowledge Acquisition were a few of the classes
I studied at KU as part of the degree program. Some of these classes were
at the Graduate level. Even though I went to MU first, I found KU to be a
fine institution of higher learning. There are many professors at KU that
gave me a positive outlook at Computer Science as a career. I met a lot of
new friends at KU, and have kept up with a few since.
Leawood, KS
Web technology started off with websites issuing basic HTML pages that were "as
is" from the server when a request was made. A technology changed, web sites
turned into more dynamic and the server would take the request, generate an HTML
page based on that request, and issue it to the client. Web applications became
the latest technology. There are many technologies to develop web applications.
For many years I developed Microsoft
Windows applications, using technologies as Borland's Delphi,
Sun Microsystems's Java, and C#. The one thing I did not get involved in
was web development. I am currently attending Centriq, learning web application
technology. It is not much different than develping a Windows application,
except for some minor differences. The main thing to realize with web applications,
is the page sent to the client is HTML and Javascript. The server processes
the requests using code-behind technology and creates the HTML page and issues it
back to the client. I am honing my skills in this technology using Microsoft
ASP.NET 2.0. In February 2008,
I will be
MCTS certified.
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