Back to My Roots

ZachSkylesOwens — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:25:44 GMT

It's been a while since my last post and this one isn't going to be able FileStream API's, SQL Data Services or other SQL Server features... Continue reading at your own risk :)

I started off my software career working as a Partner in a small web-application development company in Marquette, Michigan called Web Media Works (WMW). WMW was started as part of the Internet Bagel Cafe in Marquette where I made bagels one semester in college, and worked mostly with non-profit organizations the first year or two of it's existence. It had been a couple years since I was slinging bagels and had moved on to studying Computer Science and Spanish at Northern Michigan University (NMU). I had been bugging the owner of WMW to give me a job for months when one morning I got a call from him asking if I'd like to be a Partner.

What? Am I confused??? Did you just ask me to be a Partner?
He sure did... and the next few years of life were consumed by helping the company grow while finishing my undergrad degrees.

We had a small army of interns from NMU who powered the company... My main responsibility on the technical side was integrating the work of Designers and Developers. We did a number of really cool projects building e-commerce and e-government applications based on PHP and MySQL. We prided ourselves and differentiated ourselves from the competition by building applications with great User eXperience. We were some of the early adopters of Flash as a UI for web-applications. One of the main Designers, Dusan Harminc, has gone on to create a successful design company Stumptown Media.

The reason I'm recounting all of this is that I'm going to back to roots and will be focusing on evangelism to the PHP Community.

My main objective are:

Demonstrate why developing PHP application on Windows, IIS and SQL Server rocks!
Bring feedback into Microsoft on how we can make the PHP development experience on Microsoft even better

I'm really looking forward to this new role and am really excited to get Back to My Roots!!!

New SQL Server CodePlex Site

ZachSkylesOwens — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:04:00 GMT

Roger Doherty and I recently launched the SQL Server End-to-End Community Samples site on CodePlex. We have been successful in recruiting a few developers so you should start to see the samples really start to flow.

I encourage you to download the current FILESTREAM sample and let us know what you think.

We will be publishing a Spatial sample and a Table Value Parameter sample soon.

Zach Skyles Owens : Open Source

Back to My Roots

New SQL Server CodePlex Site