That thing that you do
Several people have asked what I do for a living recently, and it occurred to me that I very rarely give much away on the social interwebs any moreso I guess this will lift the lid a little.
I am a “professional software developer”, and I work for what used to be called a “Microsoft Gold Partner”. In reality that means I get involved in the following kinds of things;
Building entirely new software to do new things for various big companies that can afford to have people do things like that.
Building bridges between existing systems in big companiesintegrating them so doing something in one system causes something else to happen elsewherethat kind of thing.
Extending existing systems to do things it couldn't do before.
While I say “software developer”, that really means anything that involves codeI can program in C# (c-sharp), C, C++, Javascript, Java, Python, PHP, HTML, Visual Basic, SQL, CSS, and a few other dialects of programming, scripting, or markup languages.
I've worked on some huge projects that nobody will ever know about unless they see my CV. I'm not going to go name-dropping here.
I used to contribute quite a bit with open source software in my spare time (where you write something, and give it away). I wrote one of the first popular blog platforms (pre-dating WordPress) that got used by thousands of people all over the world, and then one of the early content management systems (the kind of thing that newspapers use for their website)and that got included with Novell Linux, which people installed all over the world
A couple of years ago I built an experimental social networking / blogging thing called “We The Users”, which many of you probably saw. I eventually open-sourced the code for that too.
So there you have it. I build stuff. At work I build stuff that people complain about using at work, and at home I occasionally build stuff that people monkey with on the web.