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.
New Job
On July 18, 2011, I started a new job. For security reasons, I think it would be best not to mention the company or the work that I'm doing for them. I can say, however, that I coding using C# and ASP.Net.
I switched from Java and JSP for good reason. While Java is very popular for desktop applications, I found out that ASP is the more popular framework for web development (ref) and, for several reasons, I feel that this is the trend for the future of PC applications.
.Net is by far the best web development framework that I've encountered so far. It amazes me how quickly a form that fully interacts with a database can be produced, including data validation and bind variables!
I'm very content with this job. I enjoy coding web applications in a language and framework that's fun to work with. The company has good benefits and is much closer to where I live, saving me time and gas with a shorter commute.
Icelandic Group, Inc
On March 15, 2010, I started working for Icelandic Group, in Newport News, VA.
When I started, 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 was to create reports by writing SQL Server views which are copied and pasted into a Views from within Gus. From there, I used the ERP's report and menu tool to install the report.
I was also working on an application in Java that will read incoming EDI orders from a SQL Server database and create an invoice for the Sales department. It used a DAO to populate a Bean object which in turn populated an iReport document. This program will sat on one of the servers and was launched from a timer to print the invoice on a printer.
On my own time, I developed another application in Java called "The Creeping CRUD". Its purpose was to generate code that would create Bean and DAOs objects based from a database table as defined by the user. This reduced the development time needed to produce the Incoming EDI application and could be used with future Java projects.
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.
