Home | Login | Recent Changes | Search | All Pages | Help

PatrickMorrison

reading:
blog: http://virtualpragmatics.typepad.com

I like the bio entry I have at BookShelved:

The first book I can remember reading for myself was about a trip into outer space. At the time, we lived within sight-and-sound distance of Cape Canaveral, at the time of the Apollo program. Star Trek, the original, was on TV every week. I got hooked hard on both books and technology. When I was 13, a friend of mine brought his Radio Shack 50-in-1 electronic project kit over, and let me borrow it. This led to reading Popular Electronics, which led to computer courses at Community College, which led to a BSCS at the University of Florida, which led to 20 years as a software developer in companies large and small. Almost three decades since the Radio Shack kit and I'm still wiring components together, but now they are software instead of hardware.

I'll add here: about 15 years ago I was baptized as a disciple of Christ. Since, and over, that time, I've become more enamored of people, their value and needs, than technology. Bringing the two threads together seems like a worthy ambition for the rest of my life. I look forward to AYE and to meeting the people involved, since you've been up to that for quite some time now.

Various takings of the test in "Please Understand Me" put me as somewhere between INTP and ENTP, with a very heavy lean toward N.

I spent 5 years at Darden Restaurants, doing IBM 4680 BASIC, and C for the in-store POS systems. I also spent quite a bit of time doing support. That was a great job, and a great experience.

I went to work for one of the POS vendors, Compris, doing their brand of "systems engineering" for the Burger King account. After a year, I was bored and afraid of losing my technical chops, so I went to work for one of the consulting shops that had been on the BK project.

I spent 3 years with them, mostly doing Visual Basic and SQL, and some fledgling ASP web pages.

In 2000, lured by the big time that seemed to be passing me by, I went to work for a large Boston-based internet consultancy, Breakaway Solutions. That was a wild ride, ranging from all the perks and big bonuses to down for the count and out, in about a year. But I co-managed a team of 12, wrote a lot of ASP/VBScript/Javascript/SQL code, and got to do an international project, involving both London and Zurich. Maybe more importantly, I worked in an office of people who nearly universally liked and respected each other. We were sad to part, but we have wound up combining to do projects often since then.

When I was laid off, I went back to the firm I'd left... which folded shortly after 9/11. While looking for jobs, I found that I could do a few weeks here, a few months there of various bits of development and testing, and I wound up working for myself for the next year and a half. It was exhilirating, frightening, and I would do it all over again. I learned much more of how much I don't know, and also became reconvinced that I could figure out enough to manage, with the help and support of my family, friends, and professional network.

My old boss from Breakaway eventually persuaded me that going to work for his team was better than making my own way, at least at that time, and I'm still working for him. It's a team of three, with cameos by other consultants, and I'm the sole technical staffer. These days I'm maintaining and extending two large Delphi applications, and two PHP websites, one involving customizing osCommerce for an ecommerce site. And, of course, the ubiqitous SQL.

I have all the patterns books, and many of the XP/TDD books, have read much, but have practiced little. I have found getting up to speed on these things while meeting customer needs (mostly) on time and budget to be a bit beyond my current approaches to things.

I look forward to learning some new approaches, indeed to amplifying my effectiveness, as a product of attending AYE. Patrick Morrison 10.19.2004