Hello and welcome. This is where I keep a journal of my employment, along with descriptions of projects I‚ve done and links to examples where possible.
Icelandic Group, Inc
On March 15, 2010, I left Volt and Northrop Grumman to work for Icelandic Group, in Newport News where I am currently employed.
I was dropped into the middle of new ERP implantation called Gus, a little known company here in the United States, but quite well known in Europe. My task is to create reports by writing SQL Server views which are copied and pasted into a Views form within Gus. From there, I use the ERP‚s report and menu tool to install the report.
Even though my official title is Java Developer, I haven‚t done any programming at work. The only coding I do now is my Java studies at home and PHP on this site. I do miss the days at Hampton University where I was at least doing actual web development, even if it was in Coldfusion.
If your asking yourself, “What is wrong with Coldfusion?”, check this out at http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends . As you can see, there‚s more demand for Cobol than Coldfusion programmers. While I have nothing personal against Coldfusion, it‚s just not where I want to have most of my experience if I find myself unemployed.
Northrop Grumman
On June 26, 2009, I was hired as a leased employee by Volt Technical Resources for Northrop Grumman, where I worked as a database administrator II. I was also the webmaster in my division, O57, Supply Control Management. Most of my job involved modifying and running Cognos 7 reports and then importing them into an Access application. From there, I used T-SQL and VBA to automate tasks that material manages use to analyze material process flow.
As a webmaster there, I rebuilt our division‚s entire web site, changed the style using an external style sheet, and eliminated all of the tables which were much over used in the original site.
But the bulk of my job was creating PowerPoint presentations as reports from Congos queries. This work was not technically challenging, so I left this job to work as a Java Developer at Icelandic.
Hampton University
From June 1, 2007 until June 25, 2009 I was employed at Hampton University - www.hamptonu.edu as their Web applications developer where I mostly used ColdFusion with the Mach-II MVC framework and PHP, which ran on top of a MySQL database.
The output of my several of my projects can be seen on the site by clicking the links below:
Web Portal
My largest project was a content management systems (CMS) for the staff, which we called the "Web Portal". This allowed them to add, delete, and update various parts of the site using HTML forms. Since much of what I did was "behind the scenes", only the university‚s employees have access to it and much of it is not viewable by the public.
Latest News
About halfway down on the home page, you‚ll see LATEST NEWS with the most current articles. If you click on the title you will see older news items. These are submitted by staff members at the University by first logging on to a web application available only to them and then filling out a form. A WYSIWYG editor is used to automatically convert the formatting into HTML for display on the page. Then the news items are dated and stored in a MySQL database for display on the site.
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Campus Tours
http://www.hamptonu.edu/studentservices/admissions/tour/calendar.cfm
You can click on one of the calendar dates and fill out and submit the next form, but please don't submit the form after that unless you actually want to schedule a tour of the University!
The information from the first and second forms are stored on a database. The reason for this is as follows: if the number of people in your party (the number attending) is greater than the remaining seats, or is too large for the selected tour, an error message will appear, asking you to select another date. This way, the user doesn‚t have to fill out the next form until they select the proper tour; one with enough remaining seats.
Donation
https://secure.hamptonu.edu/development
The donation pages are credit card enabled. I created the form and the connection to the company that handles the transactions. The information is stored on a flat file log and an email verification is sent to the User. You are most certainly welcome to make a donation if you like!
Jason Portell
While I coded pages for the data, design work on the Hampton University‚s web site is done by the very talented Jason Portell. He is truely a great digital artist and I highly recommend his work to anyone. Besides his art at HU, more examples can be found at his personal website: www.jportell.com.
