Introductions

Hello world. My name is David and I am 30, live in Southwest Iowa and am an Application Developer (that's what it says on my business card!). Junior year of High School a friend convinced me to take a computer programming class senior year. We were the last class taught in Pascal, they moved on to C++ after I graduated. I took a semester of C first year of college, took a few years off and then took two semesters of C++ and four semesters of Java. Had two classes in SQL Server and one in Oracle. I've wanted to be a computer programmer since High School, and now I am.

I got my first job supporting a VB 6 application and ASP Classic + ColdFusion website and taught myself .Net along the way. I am now a C# developer writing custom applications for a small company in Nebraska.

That brings me to this world. I listen to the .Net Rocks podcast as well as Hanselminutes. Scott Hanselman made a comment when talking to a designer that everyone should have a blog. I write server oriented code, so it's not possible to show people what I do, but I can talk about my experiences and such here.

On .Net Rocks the hosts brought up a comment about how writing and developing in a single language will cause a person to think and try to solve problems in that language. They mentioned the concept of learning a new programming language a year. I did some Googling and found that this is a concept brought up in the book The Pragmatic Programmer. I think I'm going to try to do this, and hopefully use this blog to document the process along the way.

From what little I've read so far, the intent is not to learn a language to put on one's resume, or even start using it on a day to day basis, but to get a different feel for things, and start thinking about problem solving differently. So I'm not sure where I'll start first, but I'm thinking about F#.

Thanks for listening!