It's My Blog

I haven’t written code in a while. Well, I haven’t written anything substantial… until now. As I was learning WordPress and discovering that a lot of the plugins had bugs here and there, I developed the taste for programming again.

When I was a kid my parents got us an Apple IIe and I learned how to program in Basic, and from then on I was hooked on technology. Up until I was almost done with High School I thought I was going to be the best computer programmer ever. I basically taught the computer science class, and I placed second at a programming competition at Clemson… but then things changed.

Computer Science was being done by cheap labor in other countries, and so I decided to study Computer Engineering instead of Computer Science. I participated in the cooperative education program in college and my jobs were things like system integration and applications engineering, and that’s how my career has gone since college, ending up now as a sales engineer.

Looking back it was the right decision to make. There is a lot of money in sales and you get to work with people, go out to different places, build relationships that aren’t between two tables in a database, etc. However, every once in a while I still get the itch to write something interesting, and the way things are nowadays with open data sources all over the web there really is just no excuse to not give it a shot.

So, now that my life story is out of the way, I’m not going to tell you exactly what I’m doing, but it is going to be really cool. Just to give you a few hints, I’m developing a Facebook canvas application using the new Graph API, driven by PHP and MySQL on my server, using an AJAX GUI based on the jQuery framework. What the application will actually do is top secret at this point, but just to give you some more hints I’m going to be pulling data from the VoteSmart API, OpenCongress.org, and USPS.gov.

I’ll be sure to make another post when I am ready to go live beta. I think this will be really fun!