A bit of an update on, well everything really.
Project “Wedding”
I’m now a married man as I got married in March 2011 to the very beautiful Suzanne
Project “Job”
April 2011 saw me leave the small marine engineering firm I was developing software for after being there a just under 12 months.
I joined an insurance firm based in Birkenhead with the promise of 2-3 years worth of work consolidating 5 systems of various size into a singlar MVC3 based system – the work sounded very interesting.
I was joining an existing team of 3 software developers and 2 software testers. The other 3 developers were very experienced and knowledgeable developers who I got to know very well and who’s passion for developing high quality software was apparent from every task that that they undertook. We were then joined by a full time Business Analyst (BA). We had plenty of fun
Unfortunately within a few months it was announced that the company would be looking at “third party solutions” first before looking at developing in-house. At the 5th month of working for the company, this then turned to “we’ve selected a third party solution so won’t be developing the whole system in-house”. As you can imagine, I wasn’t happy.
My development role was then going to change to “configuration and integration” rather than developing entire systems. So I decided to abandon ship and on the 14th of October I left the insurance firm in Birkenhead – incidentally the same day as another one of their software developers.
The other 3 developers in the team were and still are one of the best and most knowledgeable bunch of software developers I’ve every had the pleasure of working with. I also had a decent Manager who didn’t take any sh*t from anybody either….and could code too – not had one of them before either!
I was introduced to mercurial (site, wikipedia) and TeamCity (site, wikipedia), Umbracco, extended NHibernate/FluentNHibernate, Rhino Mocks (and how to use it properly!) and NServiceBus amongst many other things.
On the 17th of October I become a Contractor Software Developer/IT Consultant call it what you like
I started in a firm in Liverpool working on a C# 4.0/WPF/MVVM/SQL project which is behind schedule. I’m still there 3 weeks after starting. I’m one of 4 developers – 2 permanent and 2 contractors. So far so good.
I’m also looking for companies or individuals with C# .NET Projects – of any size or complexity who want high quality software or web solutions.
Please get in contact via email – gareth[at]garethevans[dot]info
Project “ACL Editor and Simulator v2.0″
This project has been started, stopped, restarted, stopped, restarted (repeat until bored) with a WPF Frontend which was probably the cause of all the starting/restarting but this time I’ve settled on an MVC3 based solution with Domain Driven Development (DDD) and Test Driven Development (TDD). The project stats so far:
Lines of Code: 6968
Tests: 129
…and there’s alot more to come. I’ll keep you all updated.
I have purchased a new domain name for the project, these are hosted on a server in my “Data Center” but the ADSL line coming into the DC/House is a bit flaky at present so I wont release it untill I’m happy the line is fixed or until we get FTTC. See below.
So don’t worry, the project is still on going and firming up nicely.
I will be contacting the many beta testers who have got in contact with me over the last year or two – even if you’ve previously got in contact please feel free to drop me another email!
Project “Data Center”
With permission from the Wife I bought a 24U Dell Rack which is sitting in our spare room with a Dell Poweredge 1435 running Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and a HP DL380 G3 running VMware ESX 3.5 on rails inside.
I’ve discovered a decent bsd based open source firewall OS called pfsense (site) which is being used on the network.
I’m looking for a DL380 G4 (xeon based) or DL385 G1 (opteron based) or two so I can run 64 bit virtual servers rather than 32 bit on the G3. I’ll probably still keep the G3 as it hosts the virtual firewalls.
I’ve got a Cisco 1801 routing between the internet and external network. So far it’s been fine other than the line SNR rate dropping so I need to find what’s causing that.
I’ve purchased a Dell Powervault 220S SCSI Disk Array (no disks in) and a ML350 G4 with 6 x 300Gb SCSI disks. I’m now debating whether to sell both of these items (disks separately possibly) and build a 10 disk SATA II SAN cheaper which has more scope for expansion compared to the SCSI Disk Array.
The plan is, for the servers to host the development and testing environments until the project is large enough to require a dedicated server in a proper Data Center.
Images to come when I get time and it looks tidy!
Project Website Revamp
This website needs revamping, like asap, it’s a very old theme.
Any questions, comments or feedback, feel free to get in touch.
G
End of transmission.