A little about me

Published 12 August 04 02:43 PM | jvast 

I should explain my by-line a bit and introduce myself into the blog-sphere.  I'm probably not your typical MS employee in that my entire life has been spent developing and architecting on non-MS platforms.  I actually started work life as a Mainframe system admin writing jcl and monitoring the previous day's logs for possible system malfunctions.  I then ran a ISP during the boom years of 94-96 on freebsd, BSDI, and linux.  I think of the 3, I most preferred freebsd. 

From there, I worked for a most infamous telco, Global Crossing, mostly building their intranet infrastructure, getting dce to play nice with Netscape web servers, automating DNS and NIS administration, and moving failed Swing applictions to gnuJSP.  I should point out, I ran linux and freebsd my entire time with them on my workstations.  I did have a Sun box as well most of the time, one of the old Sparc 1's - remember those?  I actually coveted those with the pizza-box Sparc 5's, although I did have a few sparc 20's I'd cobbled together.  Of course I ran gnome as my window manager - much to the chagrin of the kde contingent there.

After GC, I moved on to Broadvision and into their Professional Services practice.  Here I actually got to build some of the largest websites around, with some of them running millions of dollars of hardware and able to support 20k concurrent users or more.  As the .com bust hit smaller software vendors hard like it did BVSN, I began to assess who would win the platform war.    By platform, I don't mean the OS, but the development architecture.  As you can tell, I've hung my hat on .NET.  It did take me 8 mths to find a MS manager to hire a mut like me, but my persistence won out.

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# Senkwe said on August 12, 2004 3:08 PM:
Any chance you'd give your honest opinion of MS Windows then? If you're one of the converted, it would be nice to hear an honest account of why.

Thanks :-)
# James said on August 12, 2004 3:34 PM:
Actually, I began to lose my bias against MS after noticing BV's app performance was actually better on Windows 2000 vs a similiar Unix server, even though it was running in a MKS env. I became hooked after I built a prototype in .NET early 2002. I'd never really worked with Visual Studio, but easily built the .NET part of the prototype in 3 weeks with little code when it went into production. It then took 9 months and 6 developers to build out the server side in java, which in the prototype, I'd built out using mostly smoke and mirrors.
# James said on August 12, 2004 3:57 PM:
woops, I meant I built the prototype in 3 weeks and there were few code changes needed for it to go into production.

I should also state, I feel the OS has been mostly commoditized. Sun is still reeling from the .com bust and both IBM and HP have jumped on the Linux ship. I think the value proposition now is in the application domain.

Provide great tools and make it easy to build fast performant applications - you win. For me, J2EE is still too much about building the plumbing. (So J2EE's downfall is also why great developers are attracted to it.)


Also, I'm new to .Text and I have now un-moderated the feedback sections.
# bliz said on August 12, 2004 5:27 PM:
welcome to the blog-o-sphere!

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