I graduated college in 1992 with a B.S.M.E. (Mechanical Engineering) from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (aka UAB).

I joined Jordan Machine Company, a small, precision CNC machine shop in Birmingham, Alabama, at the age of 25. I later became part owner, and then became President in 1997 and have served in that capacity since. My duties span the full spectrum from small business owner as well as job quoting, mechanical design, finance, H/R, admin, database programming, and all the other typical small business owner stuff.

In 2004, Jordan Machine Company acquired a shredder manufacturing company from Marathon Equipment, which had previously operated as Reduction Technologies. They were once part of the Mitts and Merrill company, and it is now known as Jordan Reduction Solutions. They are a manufacturer of heavy industrial shredders and grinders for the recycling of raw materials like plastic and rubber as well as tire shredders. Take  look at the PT-6000 Tire Shredder for example. They also make granulators for plastic, wood, vinyl, carpet, fabric, etc. If you’d like to know more about these shredder machines, grinders, and choppers, you can read about them in a blog post I wrote about the tire shredder and dual shaft shredder here: Industrial Shredders are on the Move. Finally, in August 2010 we launched our Shredder and Grinder blog, which I installed on our site with the awesome WordPress  opensource blogging software.

Most of my software development experience is with FoxPro and Visual FoxPro (since 1992), but my interests and experiences span all the way back to C, C++, Visual basic, and have recently expanded to include the latest Microsoft .Net technologies in ASP.Net WebForms and MVC,  WPF, Silverlight, LinqToSql, and Entity Framework.

May 2010 – Began working with Ruby on Rails. See my Getting Started with Rails experience here.

June 2008 – C# / .Net  journey began…

FoxPro is my longest running computer language, dating back to 1992. I’m still going strong with FoxPro, but I’ve also spent the last few years really digging into other communities and languages. I’m a team member of the PEM Editor project on CodePlex, which is an advanced IDE tool for Visual FoxPro for creating and editing properties and methods while working in forms and classes in the VFP IDE. It is hosted as part of the VFPx project no CodePlex. You can see and download it here: PEM Editor, and you can also watch the video series which I produce for it. This popular tool, and some of my small contributions to it, have been topics and/or mentioned in the international publication FoxRockX. It’s hard to know for sure, but we think there have been around 1,300 downloads since its first release.

I’m a huge fan of the West Wind Technologies products by Rick Strahl for both .Net and VFP. The West Wind Toolkit for Asp.Net has many great helper classes for building web applications, an easy-to-use LinqToSql business object wrapper to help create a simple but powerful data access layer to work with SQL Server databases, and the famous DataBinder for easily wiring up your UI controls to your business object entities, and tons more. On the VFP side, I’ve made heavy use of the West Wind Client Tools for VFP to handle the data access layer in my company’s primary line of business app for labor and material tracking, quoting system, and parts database. You can read about my work with the West Wind Client Tools, and the universal extensions I’ve created for it in my blog post about this topic.

I’m on CodePlex… After I got my head above water in C# and WPF back in 2008, I created and published my WPF Hole Patterns application on CodePlex to share with others. It’s a vector based, CAD-like geometry program for laying out circular and linear hole patterns. In all, between the app and the source code, I’ve had over 100 downloads, so hopefully, it’s been helpful to some curious developers to see what they can learn from my efforts. I’ve since ported the app to Silverlight and used it as a practice field for learning the basics of the MVVM pattern. If you’d like the latest version in Silverlight, just drop me an email.