Building Better Information Environments
This is where I spend most my indoor time. Rarely do I leave the property.
the Office is a highly functional, ergonomic space with great lighting to maximize productivity and enhance focus. The farmland views outside windows provide plenty of inspiration for challenging projects.
My Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android & iOS development Lab
I live on a pre-Civil War farm in a 1861 built house close to Vermont, Saratoga and Adirondack Mountains in a historic Upstate New York hamlet raising animals, restoring agricultural land and building applications.
This is a 1890s picture of the farm. The property is finally that clear again. It took 20 years!
I found picture in article about the "Whittemore family" who built this house and farm. Picture was in section a family elder recalls walking 15 miles to the "Adamsville" farm from "Hebron" farm to help because family member died. That was 1894 and he was age 13. The property remained owned by family until 1950s.
In 1971 my parents moved my sister and me here from Long Island as babies to escape to complete wilderness. We moved 250 miles away from where they grew up, had a comfortable life and lots of family support. My parents were pioneers!
The house had not been lived in for almost 2 years. We moved in with little furniture and discovered rats and a ghost living there already. Voices echoed in the house because it was so big and empty. Bats would fly around inside at night sometimes.
My parents were not farmers but did raise a couple beef cows. That did not go well at dinner with my siblings and ended raising beef cows.
The farm was rented out in early 1980s and cows were milked in barn for 2 or 3 years. Farmland was never improved or even maintained. It was just used.
I remember fences being a problem and cows were getting out regularly. One night cows were out on the road, my father had a close call with a car and in short order the farmer and cows were gone.
The barn became vacant and land was left untouched for years. Nature grows vegetation fast; fields became bush, pastures grew young forests and beavers took over the waterways.
In 2005 I bought 3 Highland cows, chickens, a tractor, chainsaw and Kubota. Major land clearing with excavators and bulldozers began in 2008. I lived in many different places but this has always been home.
Before the Farm Office
My degree is in Mechanical Engineering and before software I worked for Ahlstrom Kamyr as a field engineer building pulp and paper mills in 5 States and 2 Providences in Canada. My responsibilities were fulfillment of contract specifications, project schedule, procurement and logistics of equipment.
Construction projects are a complex series of activities requiring a wide variety of highly specialized materials, many of which are custom-built for the specific job. This was a project management position that required tracking and scheduling of milestones, subcontractors, equipment and material.
I began using dBase III which came pre-installed on new office computers along with Lotus 123 and WordPerfect. That was the beginning of my software career.
In 1993 I formed a software consulting company - Black Diamond Software and the Summer of 1996 I started the creation of a product called Info Digger developed with Microsoft Visual FoxPro 5.0 which is an object-oriented programming language with a powerful data engine.
From 1998 to 2016 I built & supported custom business applications for clients using Info Digger as an application framework. I was constantly improving the frameworks, client applications benefitted and the future looked bright.
In March 2007, Microsoft announced that there would be no VFP 10, thus making VFP9 (released to manufacturing on December 17, 2004) the last commercial VFP release from Microsoft. Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 was released on October 16, 2007. The support of Version 9 ended on January 13, 2015.
Many devoted Visual FoxPro developers (including me) protested, held out hope Microsoft would reconsider and kept building VFP applications. FoxPro can still be found today running mission critical data systems in large businesses throughout the world. FoxPro runs on current Windows OS, powerful at data processing and rock solid dependable.
Almost 20 years invested into development of Info Digger using a Microsoft Development Tool that Microsoft made obsolete. Visual FoxPro has it's own database engine not requiring SQL Server. Visual FoxPro Applications can handle hundreds of users without SQL Server licensing fees. It was direct competition for Microsoft profits.
I learned a lesson, spent months evaluating Web stack technologies and prototyping migration paths capable of replacing Info Digger. Initially started with Java Spring Boot but after prototype builds and much testing that slowly changed.
Info Digger has been rewritten as a REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture for the World Wide Web. The core classes and language is TypeScript with two tiers of ES6 modules. Browser ES6 module runs HTML5, CSS, Document Object Model (DOM) & JavaScript front-tier. Node.js ES6 Express module incorporates FETCH, AJAX and JSON technologies with abstract data classes middle-tier to access MySQL and Oracle databases.
All the knowledge in object-orientated development and data-centric design has been transferred to better technology and a modern web application framework.