This page was likely the most difficult to write. I am not one to talk about my technical accomplishments or myself for that matter. However, from a technical standpoint I have been involved in some projects that really challenged me and for that reason I wanted to document them for myself (so I do not forget) and as a side bonus perhaps my efforts will help others like the various articles I have read over the years that I have found invaluable and helped me achieve my goals.
My father was a cattle feeder, and my family was fortunate enough to live and work on a ranch surrounded with lots of animals (mostly cows as you can imagine) and, in some cases, see some beautiful open ranges where literally the deer and the antelope played…except they were cattle (well, most of the time). I learned at a young age that technology was where I wanted to be likely fueled by the Apollo program and, of course, Star Wars! 🙂
It is a bit sad to me the meat industry has gotten a bad reputation over the years and the sentiment seems to point towards eating “manufactured” beef products grown in a lab…. yuck! The “West was not won on a salad!”
Looking back, I only have fond memories of working cattle at 2AM when the temperature was 95 F and 95% humidity. It was good experience, and it taught me the value of work and what I do not want to do. I have to admit when I got my first job in a technical field trying to make a cowboy look technical was a stretch involving much word massaging. We all must start somewhere.
In college I took a programming class for my major entitled “Aero Problem Solving in Fortran”… Fortran was not a pre-requisite. I still laugh when I think about that. My foray into programming began at that point and while I recall vividly considering throwing the computer out of the window at 3AM because my program had some errors that generated no less than ten feet of error output (at this time we used dot matrix printers with a nearly infinite supply of folding paper…yeah, I’m dating myself here). When you successfully cleared one error the output went from 10 feet to 5 feet…that was making progress!
Through some odd circumstances I may never be able to explain I later realized I enjoyed that experience more than I thought at the time and while I continued with my engineering degree, I never lost the desire to program. Looking back, I should have changed my major to computer science, but I was hell bent on getting that degree in Aeronautical engineering.
When the Internet began to take off, I was lucky enough to be able to make a career change into the field and go back to what I did not know were my true roots. Prior to this I had played with Visual Basic and Lotus Notes programming and just about anything I could get my hands on that was free. I recall writing a program for an employer in Visual Basic which the power plant operators used to enter production and injection well data. I also made it possible to see historical data…my first deep dive into data analysis and data extraction. I recall sitting at Burgers and Beer many times looking over data just because it was fun to get things to work. Total nerd!
When I go into problem solving mode the rest of the world just vanishes. It is almost like a drug and in one case after a truly fun project I had some withdrawals…like what do I do now.
I ran across SharePoint much later working at a major telecom company while trying to find a tool to manage my workload better. Excel was just not cutting it for me. This is when I discovered SharePoint which opened up a new, and more fun, world. My job was much less fun than finding ways to do business process improvement and make my job easier. Fortunately, where I worked had a large citizen developer program with some knowledgeable SharePoint folks which jump started my learning. Something I will be forever grateful for their patience and help.
It is not clear to me when I began using PowerShell and I think it was something I picked up along the way to do things in SharePoint that were a bit more involved. It has to be one of my favorite tools.
SharePoint, PowerShell, PowerApps, Power Automate is mostly what I do anymore and I really enjoy it. There is so much to learn and not enough time to learn it all well.
In my spare time I love to be outdoors, and it is one of the things I carried over from my childhood being on the ranch with my family. Hiking has to be one of my favorite activities especially when it involves either my kids, my dogs, or both. The little guy on the right is Simon who passed away a few years ago. He was one of my best hiking buddies after my kids. We had many fun adventures together and he was a truly wonderful dog. There was something very endearing about sitting on a rock sharing an apple with your pooch. Simon also loved bananas.
Backpacking was something I took up late in life and I wish I had taken it up when I was younger. It is funny that most of the people I have run into out on a trail are in the technology business. It is a great way to get away from the keyboard and legitimately tell your boss you are not reachable because there is no cell service.
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