Introduction

My name is Josh Patterson, I started NetworkDLS back in 1999, the origins of that are a completely different matter which are covered elsewhere on my website (no link, just for fun).

I would describe myself as a father and a husband followed by an assembly, C/C++ programmer closely followed by a SQL Server Administrator and developer. Yea, exactly like that Swiss multi-tool that we all know and love.

Goals

My primary goal is to expand my horizons and to seek knowledge wherever it may lie. I am motivated by an interest in complex technical endeavors and I perpetuate technical discovery on my own time.

More Info (too much??)

I really love what I do. I'm technical, logical and methodical (to a dangerous degree).

As a developer I am the independent author of hundreds of open source projects. These projects have a rather wide breadth including programming languages, web-servers, database servers, distributed document-based database systems, operating systems, storage drivers, memory drivers, load-balancers, routers, traffic shapers, dynamic DNS servers, encryption and archival utilities, proprietary SQL replication solutions, distributed file-systems, ETL engines, predictive modeling algorithms, AI simulators, etc.

While much of my development experience is with C and C++ I have been working with .NET since 2002. Still much of my open source work is still, C++ and assembly.

Electronic Engineering

As a child, I loved to take things apart - I loved to see what made them tick and to collect their components for projects. This was so apparent that my family began giving me broken electronics to tinker with as gifts. After reading The Principles of AC & DC Circuits (an old book even at the time), things really began to take a serious turn. I enjoyed designing all sorts of circuits, but most notably I spent years building and perfecting high-power MOSFET push/pull audio amplifiers and variable amperage power supplies.

Programming

As a kid, electronics began to get expensive (I couldn't work yet!). I caught wind of this crazy thing called programming and I began looking into it. There was a lot of talk about Visual Basic on the internet (which for me at the time, was WebTV) and I really wanted to learn more. Fortunately I never found a free VB compiler and instead found this funny thing called C. Funny turn of events, if Microsoft had released the VB tools for free, I might have been a VB developer and would by no means have the understanding of systems that I have today.

Thank you Jacob Navia, for Lcc-Win32 - I owe you a beer!

In the years that followed, I wrote a few programs that sold fairly well. Starting with an encryption program called 128Gamma which I discontinued shortly after it's release due to my discontent with the code quality. I had customers such as the MS Society, the Computer Science Corporation and various sheriff's offices and hospitals (the HIPAA boom).

Finally, a real job!

As soon as I was legally able to work - I did! I was given an opportunity to work full-time in IT at a fabrication shop in which I was charged with the task of building a network from the ground up and maintaining it. Their technical needs grew fast as their business model changed from specialized jobs to more mass production. Once their business volume grew by a few orders of magnitude they began evaluating several ERP products. The company they landed on eventually hired me on full time as a developer.

Database Administration

My first development job entailed a fair mix of development in Visual Studio 6 and tSQL in Query Analyzer. I was able to get fairly familiar with the inner workings of SQL server before we were merged with another company. At this new company I was able to work with a true-to-form MSSQL DBA. I built off of him bringing my experience up a few levels and was soon promoted as a DBA (and eventually even more).

I now spend most of my time in the realm of governance, architecture and SOA but the story continues.

You're not still reading are you?

No matter, I had fun reflecting.