Attitude

It has become increasingly clear to me that my attitude is all wrong when it comes to writing good code. I remember as a kid my friend and I would write small programs in C or Basic that would play the theme song to Macgyver or print random Star Trek quotes to the screen. Those were fun and exciting times. My attitude was different then. I spent time debugging and trying to learn the language. Now it seems I spend my time frustrated and depressed that the company is not moving in the way I feel it should. True or not the fun comes in solving out the problem. Making the system better. It is time to change my attitude and get back to the fun regardless of what is going on around me. With a better attitude I can work anywhere.

Week over

Well the week of programming is over and of course I didn’t get nearly enough done but I did get the C coding done. Something that I learned or I should say re-learned was that it is very common to head down the road coding and have 90% of the functionality working and in order to get the extra 10% you need to scrap everything and head down a different road. More on this later.

Week of programming

I’m about to start the week of programming. I’ve got two projects in C, a prototype in Java calling enterpise COBOL and an iPhone app. I’m excited.

Blogging

You know, I’ve had a number of blogs. I started this one back in 2006 to try out WordPress and never came back to it. I have just tired of hosting my own blog so I have decided to return.So as my first entry back I am using the new WordPress plugin for my iPhone. Not to bad. Not to bad.

Jared L. Smith

New blog. Time to get serious and start focusing on one thing I think I know something about. . . software design. A little history. My name is Jared L. Smith. The L is for Lynn and it’s just something I’ve always placed in my name to make it a little more unique then just Jared Smith. I think there is something like 4 million entries in Google for Jared Smith. But add that L and we’re down to a million.

I work as a Software Architect for a company called InfoTrax Systems in Orem, Utah. I’ve been programming since 1989 and specialize in Java and C# .Net. Currently however I work in a forth generation macro language created at InfoTrax called MPL that creates COBOL source code. I also code custom web sites using C# and ASP.Net.

I hope this blog helps shows the lessons I’ve learned in software design and where companies go right and where they go wrong. I also hope to show how the design can be properly managed to completion with the least amount of refactoring. Please feel free to comment as I don’t know everything and love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

A blogging we will go. . .