About
My name is Chris. I’m a Californian native living in Ireland. Before you ask what’s wrong with me I’ll just answer four words which seems to satisfy most people: my wife is Irish.
I have been programming since I was 10. When I should have been watching cartoons I was discovering the wonders of the for and while loop in BASIC on my TRS-80. Next I ran and extended a BBS written in PASCAL (it had 2 phone lines, high tech in those pre-Windows days!). Then it was C++ for many years. But nowadays I’m all about C# and ASP.NET.
I’m actually an old Windows MFC client guy. I started my career in Silicon Valley working for Remedy Corporation before the internet bubble burst. Things were great, they sent you to Hawaii after finishing a release, sent you to the wine country for closing the most bugs in a given week, and had beer bashes every Friday in the lobby. Then the bubble burst. Google, our neighbors, was the only company growing and eventually bought our building… those happy, smug, good looking bastards. After many demoralizing years of surviving layoffs I escaped and moved to Ireland in 2004.
After travelling around with my wife for several months I finally took the time to learn .NET. Web development was better established at that point which promised less hacking and more coding. I found this great book, Microsoft .NET for Programmers by Fergal Grimes. It gives a fantastic overview of the entire framework written for an experienced developer. And it’s all about poker! Although it covers .NET v1.1, I still recommend it as a foundation builder.
Finally, I came to work for a consulting firm which specializes in .NET technologies. Consulting is a very different game coming from a product company. While sometimes I miss the structure and professionalism (and beer bashes) you do get exposed to a lot more technologies over the course of the year than you would working on a product. Over the years I have mastered some and played with many aspects of .NET and really enjoy working with this technology.
This website is a catalogue, mostly for personal reference, of some of the more arcane problems and solutions I have encountered.
Coding Lifestyle 