Two Cents About Me
I am a consultant, designer and developer who specializes in Internet solutions and custom software. Having been in the software business for over 25 years I have witnessed, first-hand, the entire evolution of the "personal computer" and the Internet. It is sometimes hard to remember how things were without two or three computers, a smartphone and instant access to information on just about every subject. I'm constantly amazed at how far things have progressed in such a relatively short period of time.
Turns out that it takes more than two cents to cover this territory...
...here's a dollars worth.
In spite of the fact that I grew up playing with sticks and rocks, I always had a thirst for knowledge. After a few summers of working with my Dad hauling, shoveling, lifting and sweating; loading, pushing, pulling, prying and sweating; mopping, cleaning, climbing, crawling and (you guessed it) SWEATING, it was easy to consider a more cushy option (which was his aim all along). By the time I was 17 my priority was to find a less physical and more...uhmm...air-conditioned...employment opportunity. Computer jobs were all the buzz and I got wind that you could make some pretty good money programming.
When I first started out at school in 1983 the IBM PC XT had just been introduced and was FAR too expensive for most classroom environments; therefore, my first taste of programming was with BASIC on a TRS-80 (aka Trash-80) with 16K of RAM and no hard-drive. Imagine storing every single digital asset you have on a couple of quirky 360KB floppy disks. To be fair, we also had access to an HP 3000 that was used for our COBOL classes. What I couldn't comprehend at the time was how quickly things would evolve and how soon that technology would become obsolete.
Before I graduated I managed to score my first real programming job. We had a System/36 running RPG II and a handful of those amazing little standalone PC/XT's. Heck, at one point we even sprung for a PC/AT that had a 20MB hard-drive!!! My job was to maintain the desktop computers (which I figured out as I went along) and help out writing code when I could (which was my preference). Working in a tall building downtown and wearing a tie everyday made me feel like a pretty big deal. Plus my checks were huge for a 19 year old kid!
Within a year or so my newlywed wife and I were headed to California chasing our dreams. I was still working in a System/36 shop but we also had a few Series/1 boxes that handled a ton of distributed and remote tasks at various locations up and down the West coast. We eventually upgraded to an AS/400 and a Pyramid Unix machine running OS/x which significantly changed our environment. The pace really picked up when the company I worked for began to fully understand the value of delivering the right data to the right people. They made a fortune digitizing flood maps in order to provide instant flood zone lookups for insurance companies. All of this was done using C, Informix 4GL and some pretty impressive digitizing equipment.
During that time I was exposed to very many cutting edge technologies which, I suppose, was to be expected considering that we were only minutes north of Silicon Valley. Things like Windows, the Internet (not the World Wide Web), TCP/IP, E-mail and Usenet all became a part of my daily life as the 90's dawned. We IT guys all had desktop computers running Windows 3.1 with terminal emulation that allowed us to connect to the 400 and the Pyramid. As crude as it seems now, that was a huge leap forward from the old green screen terminal days (back then you were lucky to get an amber screen, ooooh). I was learning about relational databases, coding data transformation and vector graphics libraries in C and constantly expanding my horizons. After that I knew my days of back-office midrange programming were going to be numbered.
In 1993 we left California and headed for Georgia where we could be closer to our southern roots. My wife and I had both grown up in the south and the Atlanta area offered a perfect mix of city lights and southern hospitality. During the day I was still working with the AS/400 but by night my time was increasingly spent doing desktop development either moonlighting or on my own projects using Visual Basic, Powerbuilder, SQL Anywhere, dBase and Access. It was around this time I kept hearing rumblings about some new fancy-pants thing called the World Wide Web. An interesting idea indeed, but I still perceived the Internet to be a tool for universities and techies. Even though I was working to create a custom Wildcat BBS centered around auto racing, it never dawned on me that wdespread public access to the Internet might be right around the corner. Before I could blink an eye my idea had been implemented on the Web and the Web was becoming a revolution. Blast!!!
By 1996 my side projects had turned into a full-time job and, with the blessings of my wife, I decided to form my own business and DiversiCon, Inc. was born. My goal was to produce a desktop software product for advanced inventory management that could be sold to small businesses at an affordable price. The way I figured it I could invest the time up-front then sit back and reap the benefits. With a clever name like DiversiWare it would be easy money...er, reality check...It just doesn't work that way. I slightly underestimated the requirements for support, ongoing development, training, marketing, sales, production, distribution, infrastructure and many other complicated aspects of selling software for a living.
Even though I found it difficult to produce a universal software product, DiversiWare itself became the foundation and framework for quite a few custom solutions which sustained my business through the end of the 90's. What started as a simple inventory program had evolved into a very large application that managed inventory, assemblies, bar codes, component usage, purchasing, sales, e-commerce integration and shipping. Different versions of DiversiWare have been used by timber inspectors, knitting mills, salvagers and NASCAR race teams to manage a variety of business processes. When Ward Burton won the 2002 Daytona 500 for Bill Davis Racing, almost every part on the car and in the engine was tracked down to the mile by DiversiWare. Sweet!!!
As time progressed my focus began to migrate from providing custom business solutions to Internet development. In 1999 I began building static websites using Frontpage 2000. The sites were pretty by the standards of those days but they were labor intensive, riddled with inline styling and lacked any real functionality. As my clients became more sophisticated their demands started to include things like e-commerce and secure content. That's when I started learning PHP and investigating different options for improving the products I was able to deliver.
After creating a few osCommerce and Zen Cart sites I started researching different Content Management Systems for delivering general web content. Drupal emerged as the clear favorite based on my wide-ranging needs and the quality of the Drupal community. Since then I sleep a little better, food is a little tastier and every day is filled with more opportunity. The best part is that all of my development tools (Linux, Apache, MySQL, NetBeans, Subversion, etc.) are free open source software that rival most commercial solutions. It's great to have so much freedom and so many choices for my development efforts. That alone is one of the impetuses for building this site.
Overall, I've had a pretty good ride. I've learned alot about many different things, managed to stay married to the same girl and been able to earn a living while doing something that I enjoy. I feel like I've probably complained along the way but, in the grand scheme of things, I've had little to truly complain about. It will be interesting to see what's around the next corner. --RW