What I do


Here is my response to Jason Meridth tagging me.

I’m a Senior Programmer/Analyst for Flagler County School District in Flagler County Florida. Flagler county is situated in North East Florida, about 30 miles north of the famous Daytona Beach.

Even though my title says “Programmer”, I am definitely a multi-roled employee of the school district. My main duties include programming, DBA, graphic designer, Network Technician and a couple of other things here and there. Mainly I do all the database work and all the development. I am the sole developer for the school district and the sole DBA as well. My language of choice is C#, although I am starting to do more RoR development for smaller applications that have shorter life cycles.

The biggest project I maintain is our public website which can be found at http://www.flaglerschools.com. This website is built with Castle MonoRail, Windsor and NHibernte on the back end. It allows every teacher/department and school in the district to maintain their individual website through an easy to use CMS interface. For the content editor I am using TinyMCE. We have about 600 teachers on the portal at this time and about 10 schools. We just launched it this past August. It took myself about a full 5 months of development to create it.

Along with the public website there are a number of internal applications I developed and maintain. Some of these include a Timesheet logger for pay roll, a number of tools for the technology department uses to help manage active directory and our large user base. I frequently build reports and applications for various other departments in the district.

For source control I use Subversion. I was using VSS about a year ago but since going to svn, I couldn’t imagine going back. I have an ubuntu linux server that I am using for my apache/subversion server. Another linux server is my production RoR server that is running nginx/mongrel.

Working for a school district definitely has it’s perks though. Due to the fact that the district is not driven by profit opens a whole myriad of opportunities for me in the development world. First off, I can use any open source technology I wish without question. Management actually encourages me to use open source before purchasing tools as it matches well with education and as long as we have knowledgeable staff to support it, it just makes more sense. In addition to that, I can pretty much ask for anything I need (books, software, training) and get it as long as I supply a good reason for it.

I work with about 20 fellow geeks in my department whom are mainly techs at each of our remote sites. I work at the main district office along with our network routing guy and our GP/AD administrator and a couple other office staff.

 

Here are some of the tools I use on a day to day basis:

  • NAnt
  • CruiseControl.Net
  • Subversion
  • NUnit/MbUnit (newer projects)
  • RhinoMocks
  • Castle Project (MonoRail, Windsor/MicroKernel)
  • ReSharper (who doesn’t?)
  • jQuery/Prototype/Scriptaculous (moving everything towards jQuery)
  • Notepad2
  • Pentaho Data Integration (really neat tool!, instead of stupid SSIS)
  • MediaWiki (online school board policy)
  • VisualSVN (awesome tool!)
  • VS 2005/SharpDevelop for IDE’s
  • VMware Fusion on my Macbook Pro
  • Firefox w/ Firebug (couldn’t live without it for CSS/AJAX debugging)

Probably forgetting a couple but can’t think right now.

 

In turn, I tag the following:

Bill McCafferty

Colin Ramsay

Chris Patterson

 

What would you say you do here?

Choosing a JavaScript Framework