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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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The Theory: Entity Framework Layer Domain Modeling

One of the things I learned from revisiting C#II's project, eDevices was that planning out what your database schema is going to look like is pretty key to determining how easy your life is going to be down the road. In C#II, the focus appeared to be on breaking up the bigger project into smaller iterations that were built on organically--which was GREAT until I tried to implement a feature that hadn't been planned for in an earlier iteration, one that required changing one of the fields on the Policy entity. I managed to break all functionality because the Policy entity no longer matched what was expected, and I had to completely redesign 90% of my application's business logic to account for this new feature. This led to further frustration when I realized that I didn't properly manage my code first migrations for this series of changes--again, they happened organically during the class without any thought or discussion as to how to go back and make changes. Had t...
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Use Cases: Pertaining to the Project

So last time we covered the really high level theory behind use cases and why planning them is kind of important when writing a program. This is the part where I tell you I've changed my mind, I'm just going to totally wing this project since I landed an internship and I don't actually need this program to be professional looking. PSYCH--did you even read how I closed the last post? That was hilarious. But anyway. I didn't actually go through the full CSCI-1275 "discovering your use cases through '20 Questions,' rune reading, and chasing clients for interviews" approach. We spent close to a month on use cases in that class--how to identify them, how to define them, how to model them, and a little on how to prioritize them. The bulk of the class was use cases, and like I said...I get it now. But that doesn't mean I'm doing to sit and actually write out a full CRUD technique analysis of all the ways a single user will interact with a ...
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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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