Name: Buck Hicks
Location: Three Rivers, MI
Occupation: I.T. Specialist (what ever that means)
Programming Lang: Visual Basic .Net
Experience Level: Moderate
More About me: I am in my ninth year of doing Development work, which started with VBA in Access and progressed to Visual Basic 6, which then led to VB.Net (the latest version of VB from Microsoft). I am also a pretty decent Crystal Report writer and am getting real comfortable writing SQL queries for various data mining purposes. Oh yea and I can do some web stuff (ASP.Net) but that is still more of a hobby for me then it is anything else.
Eight Years seems like a long time and one might think I would be an expert programmer by now. However, for most of those years programming was a hobby for me or something I did as a small part of my job. I have changed jobs twice since I started down this road and now carry the title of an I.T. Specialist.
Being an I.T. Specialist I still wear many hats when it comes to my day to day routine but I have reached the point that I am doing some type of development work every day. So now that I get paid to do what I have always wanted to do I am trying to become better at it. That is to unlearn the bad habits I picked up in my early days of developing applications in Access and to learn some good habits like using the concepts of object oriented programming and abstraction in the applications I write today.
Anyway since I don’t have a Computer Science degree, or any degree for that matter, it wasn’t an easy task getting to the point that I am now. I am mostly self taught through my large collection of programming books and with the help of some great people on the Internet who took (and still take) the time to answer hundreds of my “how do I do this or that” type questions.
It is a simple fact that without all of their help I would not be able to make a living doing what I love to do. And for that reason I would like to use the new addition to the forum to help out any aspiring local developers who want to get started in this field but are not sure how to do so.
