Hi!

How did you reach my blog? Via LinkedIn? Twitter? Facebook? Regardless, I'm happy to have you here!

The impetus of this blog is to add a piece to my jog-hunting strategy—online social networking is a major piece of job-hunting these days, according to everyone who talks about it. This is hardly my first blog—I've blogged off and on for years, for hobbies and the cohousing project I helped design and build. But this blog will cover entries related to my professional career, which is software development and support.

Most of my software development career, to date, has revolved around one job--albeit a job held at four different companies, and punctuated by a layoff. (Computer Concepts bought by ScottStudios, bought by dMarc Broadcasting, bought by Google...) That job worked with appplications to control the programming and broadcasting at radio stations. I worked on three generations of software, from DOS, to Windows/MFC, to the distributed, loosely-coupled platform developed by dMarc Broadcasting and then Google, (and now handled by WideOrbit). Most of the coding I produced was in C++ on the Windows platform, though the last year and half, I worked with cross-platform C++ libraries, and had the opportunity to do some coding in Java.

Since my last full-time job ended, I've been working on expanding my programming skill set. I studied and passed the certification exams for the .NET 3.5 Framework last summer, for both Web and Application development. I've also taken a class in Ajax, and have been working through Agile Java, an excellent book which teaches Java from the Test-Driven Development point of view. I've also been working to improve not just the range of my 'language' skills, but to improve the quality of my coding skills as well. There's a very interesting book called Clean Code: just in the first couple of chapters, I learned several ideas for improving how I code.

I hope to add entries to this blog several times a week, so I hope you'll be back!

Linda