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About Me

I've spent a lot of time avoiding and half-assing college. I had a hard time finding fields of study that made me even want to enroll, and more often than not once I started on the classes the path wasn't interesting or valuable enough to make me want to work through the grind towards the almighty piece of paper at the end of the tunnel.

So let's montage through a series of ups and downs we can call my career--from making change in a Wendy's drive thru to writing the schedule and ordering thousands of dollars of food every week. From delivering pizzas up to hiring and firing delivery drivers. From driving a forklift and tossing cartons on conveyors to building a 15-person department from scratch. Finally, learning how to use MS Access to merge three very complicated international shipping data processes into a push-button system even our high school drop out temps could use to get their work done faster.

That last one is important, because when that piece was taken over by the "professionals," I knew I was done in operations. I had seen what could be accomplished by a guy at a keyboard with a schema map and the right network permissions. There was no way I could go back to motivating underpaid temps to work harder to make up for the fact some guy at the keyboard with no domain knowledge kept getting use cases wrong.

Fast forward almost three years. I've managed to stick it out through an entire associates degree. I'm within 4 courses of graduating. I know a lot more than I did when I was massaging data in a warehouse half-cubicle...but only enough to be dangerous. you can't learn some of this stuff in a classroom or from a power point slide on an online Blackboard link. That's where the internship comes in...

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Use Cases: The Theory

They told me in my CSCI-1275 Systems Analysis and Design course there's a tendency for programmers to just start coding stuff without thinking, and this was nigh on tantamount to total catastrophe. I didn't fully understand this until a little later in the semester. We had just learned about arrays and collections in my CSCI-1630 C# Programming I course, and I found this to be a perfect excuse to write a little application that would synthetically divide polynomials . (That's a really great way to master synthetic division, actually, if you're interested in brushing up on that skill. Although my wife still insists the time would have been better spent putting more time into my algebra homework. Two types of people...). At any rate, long story short: I made the program work perfectly, for 3rd degree polynomials that divided evenly. Then I realized it broke when I tried a polynomial of the 4th degree. And then again when the 3rd degree polynomial had a remainder. ...
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Sequence Diagrams: Theorizing

The activity diagram is all well and good, and can even be super useful in a lot of cases. But for my money, so far in my limited experience, the sequence diagram is where you really start to get a handle on what you need to do as a programmer. Before the sequence diagram, you're dealing with steps in a process. What needs to happen, in what order, and you could just as easily be talking about employees or way stations or widgets or nothing at all. They're really about systems analysis--that high level, what needs to happen kind of stuff. Really important work, but totally dull from a programmer standpoint. The sequence diagram is where we start seeing method names and parameters being laid out. The interaction between classes and layers. You start to see what methods you'll need, in what classes, and get a feel for what properties those classes will need. You can see the flow of the data from the start of the operation to the end, note the inputs and the outputs. I...
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Activity Diagram: Theory

So I've got use cases figured out. Not all of them--only a fool or a genius thinks he can sit at a desk away from the end user and think he's got all the use cases figured out (and a genius would never truly believe it). But you can't sit around trying to anticipate every possible use case before you start, so once we have enough to cobble together a complete program or part of one we can move on for a bit. Side note, this is the beauty of the agile approach: "Yeah, we know we gotta go to the moon. But we have to do it in 10 years, so we can't spend 5 years thinking up every problem we might need to solve before we start solving them. How about we start with 'design a rocket that reaches orbit without killing anyone' and build on that when we finish?" That's called an iteration, but more on that later. Fleshing out what that use case needs is the next step, and there are a couple tools I remember being taught. One of them is the activity diagra...
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