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I started my first official position in the technology industry. I was
hired by the Todd Organization with the position of Applications Specialist
Intern. The position was my first formal introduction to ASP, SQL, and Microsoft
SQL Server. The experience was excellent, and I got to work with a strong
financial company and learn about the financial side of executive compensation
services. |
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I finished with my bachelor's degree in information science from the University
of Pittsburgh. At this point I had a great liberal arts background, and
my skill set was fairly modest. I had classroom knowledge of C, C++, visual
basic, and HTML but there was much room for improvement. The Office of Admissions
and Financial Aid (where I have worked since my freshman year) offered to
take a chance on me and offer me a position as a graduate student assistant.
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After school finished I worked full-time for the summer serving as assistant
systems analyst for the Admissions Office. My projects started with designing
websites and maintaining reports written in ASP. I was also studying the
.net framework in my personal time per the office's request. |
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My work with ASP.net and VB.net officially started, and I began writing
solely .net code. We started migrating existing reports that support the
admissions office to .net. The migration was the first step we decided to
take in preparation for the University's migration to PeopleSoft Enterprise
Resource Planning tool slated to roll out in August of 2004. |
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I strengthened my coding skills and have harvested a lot of new abilities
in web based application development. I was formally trained to use PeopleSoft
and began working extensively with my supervisor to layout mechanisms to
work with data from the Universities data warehouse. For security reasons
we had to maintain a secondary warehouse of the data that was pertinent
to our office.
The data warehouse was a familiar topic from my database management class,
but writing the complex queries necessary to retrieve data needed for web
reports proved to be a cumbersome task. I spent an extensive amount of time
formally learning how to write and optimize complex queries against the
PeopleSoft data warehouse and write easy to use reports that could support
the office needs. |
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The University officially rolled out the first phase of the PeopleSoft
migration project. At this point my skills in query writing, and coding
client/server applications are much stronger then ever before. Now I had
to learn how to rapidly produce projects because we were attempting to make
the staff adapt to PeopleSoft immediately and only use Recruitment Plus
(our previous student management system) as a backup utility. All of the
IT staff was putting in many extra hours, and I learned what it takes to
produce quality products on a short time line. |
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Guest lecturer for CS 134-Web
Site Design & Development. I was offered the opportunity
to share my web development experiences and knowledge
with an undergraduate web design course. The concepts
that I was responsible for were standards related. My
lectures focused on XHTML standard as written by the
W3C as well as the proper integration of Cascading Style
Sheets. I tried to show elements of good design and
explain cross browser compatibility. |
