Greetings!

Welcome to my virtual playground. It's a place where I can post various projects and thoughts. Some of these are things I'm interested in, some are development items where I want to learn some new skills. Feel free to spelunk around and please leave me some feedback if you are so inclined. Or if you are really intrepid, you can register and have access to leaving commments and maybe some other 'members-only' stuff.

 

The TL;DR is that for 17 years, I ran a software analytics software company that I started with a friend in 2000. I sold it in 2017 and "retired". I have an awesome wife and two amazing kids. I have time to ride my bike, tend my garden, and enjoy craft beer (and my real guilty pleasure - ultra premium tequilas!) with friends. But I don't do boredom very well...

 

My Story

One hard part about writing a compelling story is having a good beginning and ending. Which sort of puts me in a pickle; because the story isn't over yet, and I really don't know how far back to start and honestly, I don't know how much effort I want to put into this part of this site. So I think I'll tackle it Memento-movie style, and work my way backwards.
 

Until around the Spring of 2020, I had been pondering several projects to pick up since selling my old Company, Ctuit Software in 2017. I was getting pretty close to finalizing something with some of my Ctuit crew that I'd kept in contact with, but the Coronavirus pandemic steamrolled any plans.
 

It had been since around 2007 or so since I'd done any meaningful web development - all for good reasons - Ctuit had grown big enough to hire better talent than me. But a lot had changed in 14 years: I needed to refamiliarize myself with HTML stuff like bootstrap and jquery. And don't get me started on how long I avoided Ajax thinking it was some complex mysetery magic. I also rediscovered d3.js - again something I knew about a long time ago but dismissed it as being too complicated for a rusty wannabe former software developer like me. The list goes on. Hosting a SQL Server and Web App in Azure? Fuggeddaboutit. For more than a decade, any time I needed to deal with anything like that I had the honor and privilege of calling upon an amazingly talented team of people to get the results I wanted. And now - it's just me. (Though I need to accredit Bob L for his tutelage over these last few months.)
 

What you see here is me having fun and slowly starting to create again. I do *not* consider myself a great programmer - And I have a (former) team of employees and coworkers who would probably agree without hurting my feelings - My focus at Ctuit went way beyond development.
 

Now I just want a place to put up some hobbies and prototypes. If people find them interesting, all the better. Anyhow, That's the short story of how my online playground came to be. Maybe someday I'll add earlier chapters of my story.
 

P.S. I don't have a QA team any more. So if you find errors, please leave me some feedback, but be gentle please. :)