Long Time, No Post

Greetings from behind the keyboard!

I have been too preoccupied with life to bother keeping my blog up to date. So much has happened since my last post. Too much to go into, in fact. In short, I have been through several job transitions, my daughter moved away, back to Arkansas, and away again, and my sons are going into fine young men. My wife started working after 19 years or so taking care of me, the house, and our family. Still, as I said, its too much to go into.

I mentioned job transitions.  In 2010, I was working for CAT^2. After departing, I moved on to Aristotle for a few years. In 2012, it was on to EndToEnd Computing for a very brief engagement. I was very happy to find Northrop Grumman in November of 2012. As a .Net Developer, I fit in easily with the work they were doing for the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services. My team specifically worked in support of DCFS, and I was soon leading a team of 3 .Net Developers. Now, a full 5 years later, I have moved on. Deloitte won the contract, and NG is out as of December 31st, 2017 at midnight. I now work as a .Net Software Engineer for Vestcom Retail Solutions near Downtown Little Rock.

I have also not been using this blog to post question and answers to technical issues I have encountered. I began relying more heavily on StackOverflow.com for that purpose. As of this moment, I show an impact of approximately 80k people there. Here is my profile link: https://stackoverflow.com/users/831800/taersious

If you are reading this, I appreciate the visit to my blog. I will post more updates about work and family more often in the future as I am able.

Blessings,  

Drewberry 

Welcome!

Greets! I am excited to have finally gotten started in the whole blogging world. This has all happened at the bequest of a certain blogger I met just today. (Robin Meuré) I say met, but actually, I just IM'd with him. He asked me if I had a blog. I had to admit reluctantly that I had not taken that step as yet. His is glorix.blogspot.com.

I will be posting on different topics on this blog. Topics will include my professional life and skills I have developed, as well as important issues to me (like family life).

My professional life has given me the opportunity to grow in many different areas, but not excel enough to be a guru in any area. I have been doing HTML since 1997, a skill I picked up while killing time at the University of Central Arkansas' Computer Science Unix Lab. In 1998, I started an internship with Acxiom Corp (http://www.acxiom.com/) working on their Y2k intranet. In 1999, I started full time with them in an R&D group, doing VBScript (ASP) and Javascript to provision a site for their much-touted Acxiom Data Network. While working, I picked up some T-SQL skills, and SQLServer skills, but not enough to succeed at being a DBA. (Which just happened to be my next gig.) In 2003, I moved on to work for a 1-man shop doing T-SQL, DTS Packages, and batch scripts for automation as a consultant with Alltel. After 6 months of this, I moved on to a small company in the area who shut their doors after I worked for them for 2 weeks. I then moved on to work as a consultant for the state as an area coordinator. While doing this work, I maintained the web site and database. I stuck with this consultancy role far too long. I ended up being hired by the state in 2005 to fill a role that was not IT related. I just considered all my IT skills a bonus. So did the director. In total, I filled that role for a year and a half. During that time, I was able to attend an ASP.Net training class at Complete Computing (http://www.complete.com/). I left this role for the opportunity to be a consultant for this division, but according to the lawyers, a state employee may not leave the employ of the state and subsequently enter into a consultancy until after a 12 month time period has passed. So, I moved on to my next gig; working for a school district's IT department, doing ASP, ASP.Net, T-SQL, Javascript, HTML, and heavy DHTML. I moved on after 6 months of fun. Since 2006, I've been with a company serving as a Solutions Developer, working on VBA, VB.Net, ASP.Net, DotNetNuke, T-SQL, DTS Packages, SQLServer 2000 and 2005, as well as my HTML/DHTML and Javascript.

That's enough about work. Now for a little about my family. I've been married to my wife since 1995, and we have 2 boys who are 9 and 6. We also have a daughter who is 17. She is mine, but many people say she looks enough like my wife that folks cannot tell. All of my family currently live in Arkansas. My Mom lives a bit more than an hour away in North Central Arkansas. My Dad lives in Conway, my sister and her family live in Conway, and my younger brother and his family live in Conway. My older brother and his family live west of Little Rock. So I can visit any of my family within about an hour drive. We are a very close family, and we celebrate our closeness as often as we can. We enjoy food. Can I say that again? We enjoy putting a feed on! I may end up posting some of our favorite recipies here, too! (Not too many, though!) This is a guy's blog, after all.

Enough of the introductions. I'll post some more later.
Thanks for visiting!