Karen in a nutshell
Tags: career
Published: 2024-01-20 17:13:47

## Introduction

Thought I would give a brief glimpse into my journey as a developer.

## Software manager at CompuUSA

While being mentored by my brother-in-law, first with Assembler and C followed by spreading my wings with honing skills by writing code with Nantucket Clipper with libraries written with C I got a management position at a software company mainly because of my background selling custom window treatments at Bloomingdales with employees under me.

Perfect in that software vendors offered me free software and yes, I took advantage of these opportunities. Met a customer who we both hit it off and now had another mentor. He thought with my knowledge would be worth speaking at local user groups which, and I forget how this happened but started writing articles for a popular developer magazine which in turn had companies calling asking if I would do contract work? For a year I worked as a contractor after leaving the software company.

## Tired of contract work

Its 1993 and Karen has tired of travelling from state to state for contract work, it pays well but a lot of driving and long days. Her brother-in-law who mentored Karen had moved to the West Coast the year before and thought it would be great Karen to move out there too. So he sent her a year subscription to the state newspaper. Roughly six months later an opportunity appeared where the company was without a developer for five years, they had a contractor who left because he wanted more money so the company decided to use work out of class employees to fill the gap. It came to a point where this failed.

Karen, in short applied and was selected for the position. 

First order of business was to immediately request a salary increases, they said no and I came back and said good luck followed by a counter proposal that if I proofed by worth in six months they would double my salary. 

Next order of business, they asked what did I want for hardware? The person in charge (who would later transition to a developer role under me) of purchasing was well versed with computer hardware recommended the best monitor and the best computer, done.

Once everything was in place, I had three division leads via for my time, was not a pretty picture, I sat back and watched.

Next up once I had an assignment, walked around the floor where users of the first application I was to work on worked and introduced myself along with asking them for what could be done to make their life better.

Too work, spent a week learning the first application that needed work, by my side when needed an expert on the application which I requested. The next three months addressed and fixed all issues along with finding and fixing issues they were unable to resolve.

Moving to six months at the company, the CEO came to my desk and informed me that I proofed myself and my salary was doubled.

Funny thing happened around the same time, my boss knocked on my door and said I needed to slow down now. He was shocked to see all I had for furniture was a table and a table (he didn’t see I was sleeping on an air mattress). Next day he came back with an old couch and old television for me.

## Secret work I

Was offered to work for an entity which I can not name, was out in the middle of nowhere so I refused to accept.

## Moving on down the road
Jumping some years later, the company finally decided to hire more developers and me as their team lead. That was not good enough for all divisions so other developer teams were created and with that different standards and multiple programming languages. I argued that Borland Delphi should be used but Microsoft Visual Basic instead, was not happy at all. The adage at the time was anyone could program in VB which was true but not always well.

Around the same time C# and VB.NET came out, you guessed it, the VB developers went to VB.NET so I had too also but after work hone my skills with C#.

Something learned when first starting out was how to listen to a customer and write down requirements along with meeting with customers to show them progress and issues which many developers do not and this leads to the following.

## Taking a backseat

My boss thought it would be good to have two team members take on a project rather than myself so I could focus on a leadership role. 

With the following I put too much trust in the two developers, they fell short, and the project was trashed, not worth salvaging. Postmortem, the developers did not listen to clients, refused to budge on additional requirements and worst was their focus seemed to be more on using new language features. This cost eight months of delays.

What happens next? My boss said to try two other developers which I argued against and lost. You the reader might wonder about what is the client using? An old MS-Access application.

Well, this team failed also and took a year, current boss moved on and the new boss asked me what could be done? I said, let me take on the project, she said no, team leaders have other responsibilities.

Time goes by and the client now is complaining so I’m allowed to take on the project. First order of business was to meet with stakeholders, laid out my plans and indicated each day myself and two business stakeholders would have a 15-minute standup meeting to discuss progress and issues.

Just under three months the application went to production with zero defects, well there were two defects found down the road and fixed. This application lasted for seven years.

Looking back, I should had been allowed to monitor progress the first team worked on and believe that would have made a successful release.

## Secret work II

This time it was temporarily and close by, took it. NDA prevents me to go any farther. What I can say is have been stopped by law enforcement six times, never a ticket.

## Stirring the pot – there is a new boss in town

Time to separate those who thought they were developers to those who could or were professional developers.

Circa three years later we get a new boss, the first boss that use to be a developer. One of his first order of business is to get rid of VB.NET in favor of C#, toss away DataSet/DataTable in favor of Entity Framework 6 (EF Core was a ways off). Out of eight team members, one jumped ship, three others retired. Those positions were replaced by extraordinary developers.

For the next two years we used a hybrid version of ASP, did TDD, wrote exceptional test and way ahead of the game with source control.

I left for another company owned by the first company after 25 years to fix a large WPF project, refactored several services and adapt to their main language Cold Fusion. The moved started by the second company asking the first company if they had someone that could come over and fix a C# application that a contractor was working on but doing well.

Five years later I retired and now to fill my time do contract work. Interesting that the ASP projects I worked on, the entire team had left, and the current team has no clue how to move to ASP.NET Core so I get hired as a contractor to perform conversions and mentor the current team but its impossible to do all the work at once, let’s say it’s complicated.

Today one of my main focuses is assisting clients with refactoring web pages to be responsive and WCAG compliant along with fixing client applications bugs.

## Outside of coding

From 2000 to 2015 was a lead defensive personal defense instructor certified in empty hand combative, knife counter knife, handguns, and rifles. Was offered the opportunity to train with police officers for various tactics and certified as an instructor. I stopped in 2015 as it consumed my life as I was now not only teaching but after being certified as a bodyguard there was no time for my new passion, driving fast cars. I still assist former students when asked.

## Summary

There is more to my story than presented but think this is enough.