The I.T. Life

Whos with me here? Ever since my time at NSCC, they have pushed the “portfilio” concept. I have seen its use, and lack there of. Yes, a portfolio is a great idea, espically in IT, and web, where we can put all our stuff in one location to show to a potential employer or a contract. Company portfolios are extreemly powerfull, to be able to give a presentation to a client and quickly show what you have down. On the other side, as a IT worker, to beable to show what you have in a very slick way can be just as powerfull. Now, I have never been asked for a portfolio in a interview, however I have been asked for work examples. My idea is for a very quick way to do this. I want basically a purpose driven CMS. I want to develop a product that has a uber slick install like wordpress, has a great backend, has a very customizable front end. I want it to be Ajax driven, PHP/MySQL, I want to use a solid open soruce framework, and I want it to be popular. But will it be? If you had this, would you care? Would the kicker for you be that you have a very powerfull back end, and a front that is so customizable you can create a flash template instantly? or a flex site for that matter? I’d like to hear from some guys in the community right now, users, and developers. What do you want, what do you need? What can make this something that you want to use? So, whos with me?

I think I’m going to take the bit jump and convert my portfolio over to the zend framework. Its a excellent framework that should simplify alot of the tasks that I am doing already, and give me the flexability to expand it. The idea behind a framework is that most of the work will be done for you, you have a massive library of code behind you that you can tap into. It cuts down your overhead by giving you pre-written code. Also, moving to zend will mean I can convert the site to full OOP and MVC. The problem of course is though this will have many long term advantages, this will mean taking a project that is about 50% done, and sending it back to square one. This won’t be a really quick transformation, but I think it will be at the very least, a good experiement.

This one is going to have multiple phases. Phase one is to take a pre-existing odb2 application written in vb and port it to a C app for windows, than port it over to mac and linux. The second phase will be a command line application, based on the pre-existing framework to monitor speed via the obd2 port of your car, and based on predefined limits, sound a audible alarm when you exceed those limits. To kill the alarm you would simply hit the enter key, this would then prepare for the next alarm. There will also be a top speed, that will have no kill switch, and will continue to sound until you slow down. The last major phase of this will be building a device using a micro controller, a buzzer, and a physical button. It will plug into your odb2 port via a cable, and sit on the dash. This project has some initiative, just because it has some support from a friend of myne who already has a good idea how this will work. So, stand by!

Check out the SF project here.

I have a bunch of projects on the go, many in a beta stage, many more in a planing stage or design stage. These projects either get ignored, or just die and nothing ever happens. Nobody ever sees them, and they are not at a stage I would ever show a employer. Because of this, I decided to take my best 3 concepts (all web apps somehow) and put them on source forge. This will give me the motivation, and possible community support to get them done, and ready for anyone to use. This way, I can show I have been supporting open source software, and I have been persuing my own interesting in programming, and constantly growing. Hooray! Anyways, here are the links.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/easycatalog
https://sourceforge.net/projects/easybookmarks