Professional Career
Initially, I went to college at The
University of Missouri-Columbia, majoring in Chemical Engineering. Unfortunately,
I ran out of money and had to start working. I hired on at Bendix (now Honeywell) in Kansas City. After working for a couple years,
I returned to college, while continuing to work at Bendix, studying Mechanical Engineering
at The University of Missouri-Kansas
City. During this time, I became intersted in programming, eventually enrolling
at The University of Kansas in Lawrence,
completing a degree in Computer Science. I have spent the last fifteen years working
with computer systems either maintaining them, or programming them, as needed, along
with my other responsibilities.
A project I worked on was a multi-user LIMS package for tracking laboratory tests.
This project included several members on the team, modifying a COTS access database
to function as needed for the lab. Other projects I worked on involved different
technologies such as Java and C# to generate windows applications to support laboratory
operations. I also corrected computer hardware and software issues for the laboratory.
When we did a plant-wide rollover to Windows 2000, I was a valuable member of the
process plant-wide. I identified and corrected many issues with the rollover.
Part of my duties made me one of the first customer contact points in the laboratory.
I would log in samples into the laboratory LIMS database, separate, and deliver
them as needed to the proper workstations. Customers needing the job done quickly
would bring the sample directly to me to expedite the work. I would also contact
the customer, if further samples were needed.
My favorite Java environment is the
Eclipse Project. Eclipse is an open-source java development environment.
I have been using it since version 2. Visual Studio is another development environment I have
used. My favorite languages for developing Microsoft Windows applications are C++
and C#. Java works well for the environment, if you don't want to deploy the application
to the user's computer. I developed java applications just for that purpose. The
java run-time environment is all that I installed on the client machine, keeping
the java jar files on the server. Communication to the application was a shortcut.
It was easy to setup. Updates to the application was easy. I would update the new
version of the application to the server, replacing the jar files I needed. The
client would then update itself on the next run. I never was able to get Java to
communicate through serial ports, so I was forced to use C# to create that application.
The .NET framework makes deployment much easier, than COM deployment.
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