It's about time

I think this is probably the most appropriate time in my life to start an online journal (blog). So much has changed in my personal and professional life in the last few years, I graduated college, got married, bought a house and we now have a four month old son! I've had a number of websites, including a wedding site and our current home page (brianandkarla.com) for a few years now, but I haven't really recorded any details of my experiences on these sites.

I've also had some amazing experiences working as a software developer at Alterity, Inc. I think that's what I'm most interested in writing about on this site.

We hired two new employees that will be working with me and I've been training them for the last two weeks. I've been explaining different technologies that we use to develop and support our software (ACCTivate!) and I am realizing that it's time to start recording this stuff in a permanent, easy accessible format. I was asked if there were any books that I recommended for them to read to learn about the tools we use. My first instinct is to refer them to the technical books covering SQL Server, Crystal Reports and Visual Basic, but I don't think that's really necessary. Learning the tools is not the hard part. The difficulty is in learning how we actually use these tools and what functions of each of these tools that they need to learn and which functions they won't be using much (at least for now).

I've chosen to use Blogger since the interface is very easy to use and I won't be tempted to completely re-write the source code. I'm running Movable Type on IIS to manage brianandkarla.com with a lot of custom modules and some ASP code to generate photo albums. It's easy to use for creating photo albums, but it's not very portable due to the quantity of pictures on the site and my unwillingness to pay for hosting. It's also somewhat unreliable since it's now running over wifi since I lost my home office and I'm too lazy to run the network cable.