About

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

Business Owner – 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 – (and also “JRS”) . 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.

 

Software Developer – My interests and experience with programming spans all the way back to C, C++, Visual basic, and have recently expanded to include the latest Microsoft .Net C# / MVC / Web API /Entity Framework technologies. I’ve also done some small projects in Ruby on Rails. I also have many years of business app development , dating back to 1992. I’m still going strong with Visual FoxPro, but I’ve also spent the last few years really digging into other communities and languages.May 2010 – Began working with Ruby on Rails. See my Getting Started with Rails experience here.

I have open source projects on:

GitHub: https://github.com/mattslay?tab=repositories

GitHub Gists: https://gist.github.com/mattslay

BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/mattslay/

 

I am the author several FoxPro tools:

GoFish Search Tool

Dynamic Forms

wwBusinessPro data access framework (based on wwBusiness by West Wind Technologies)

 

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.

Doctor of Code