The Start of Something Beautiful?

So, I've finally got around to making my own blog. Why have I decided to do such a thing? Well, I thought it was about time I gave something back to the community.

Let me tell you a little about myself. I've always been interested in programming, ever since I've known what a computer was. Around the age of 14, our family invested in a computer that could actually connect to the internet, back then the greatest connection you could get was over a 56k modem, but none the less, I loved it. As soon as I could connect to the internet, I started to wonder.... how do hit counters work? How does the time get stamped on the Yahoo! website? Come to think of it, how on earth do you make a website? And so, I set out to learn such things, I looked up articles online, I bought books and over a period of time, I taught myself JavaScript, HTML, PERL and PHP. This knowledge would stand me in good stead for the future, the JavaScript and HTML proving to be invaluable in my current job

Well, I then and got a few A Levels and headed off to the University of Essex to study Computer Science where, I tried to study just about every programming course I could get my hands on but, due to my fascination with the Internet, I chose to specialize in Internet Technology where I had the pleasure of looking at C, C++, Ruby on Rails, Java (and the internet tech that uses Java e.g. servlets, JSP, applets) and finally, ASP.NET.

I graduated University with a first class degree with honours and set out into the big wide world where a company that specializes in property management software was kind enough to hire me as a software developer. When I first started, they were primarily using Oracle Forms, a technology so old, I hadn't even heard of it. Fortunately, plans had already been made to migrate from Oracle Forms to a web application using ASP.NET WebForms as the platform to develop for. I was fortunate enough to be involved in that project. That project started 2.5 years ago and is still on going, as I'm sure you can imagine, moving ASP.NET suddenly gave us a whole range of things that could be done which just wasn't possible on the old technology stack so, we started implementing cool new features. My internet technology background put me in a good position for this and so I've been involved in developing things that, if I'm honest, I didn't even know was possible 2 years ago. These mini projects have thrown up all sorts of issues, some of which, I think, would be beneficial to share with the community.

Maybe someone else will stumble across the same problem(s) and use this blog to find a solution, maybe someone can come up with a better solution, maybe someone can find ways to improve my solutions. These are the reasons I want to share my experiences with you and so, Clements Code (a name which I truly hate by the way) was born.