Kartech Blog

One of the things I have really enjoyed about my career is the variety of jobs I have done. I have always been in a position where I have had to wear many hats. Now that I am in my fifties, I have had over thirty years of implementing solutions across different architectures and disciplines. At the beginning of my career, I did very little software development and my focus was more on system administration and database administration. I worked on Windows and Unix environments and managed databases in Oracle and SQL Server. Later in my career, I built email, web, and DNS infrastructures on multiple platforms. I have managed some mall networks and firewalls and then started shifting more toward software development. I have done web development for a number of clients in languages like Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, Java, ASP, and finally ASP.NET with various Javascript frameworks.  The one disadvantage of bouncing all over the place in IT is that I have never...

As I get closer to retirement age, I have been thinking about what my working life will look like over the next couple of decades. Having owned a restaurant during the financial crash, I lost all my savings just trying to keep my house from being foreclosed, so being able to retire is probably not going to be an option. My current career requires significant mental acuity to keep my skills up to date, and the plasticity of my brain isn't what it once was, so it is getting harder and harder to keep up.  As a consulting professional, my skills are what I need to market myself. I have actually quit several jobs because the work was degrading my skills. If I work on a project for six months to a year that involves maintaining out of date technologies or working in a framework like SharePoint, my knowledge of current technologies will diminish while the world moves forward and the tech evolves. When I finally get back to working on something new, I have forgotten so much and ther...

Recently my son Forrest started listening to Audible books on business, finance, and overall self-improvement. Forrest owns a lawn care company and he had been following some other guys in the business on YouTube when one of them mentioned that if you are going to be sitting on a mower all day, you could also be learning at the same time. This sparked something in him. Within the first week, he had gone through three books including classics like "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "Rich Dad Poor Dad". Not only did he enjoy the books, but he also became even more passionate about his business. He loved being able to correlate lessons from the books to things in his daily life. One of the examples he mentioned to me was that you had to always remember that every customer knows a hundred people. You grow your business by taking care of every customer, and they will refer you to their friends. For me, this was rea...

I had lightspeed internet installed at my office today which is a synchronous fiber internet connection meaning it is the same speed for upload and download.  I have had a lot of internet connections installed over the years, ISDN, DSL, T1, Cable, and this has been the smoothest and highest quality experience I have ever had.  One of the main reasons I chose the location of my office where I did was because Lightspeed had just run fiber across the street. When I called to order service, they said that they would have to do some construction outside to get the fiber to this side of the street, but they could get a crew working on it. I was a little worried it would take a few months to get installed, but it ended up taking exactly a month.  I got the call last week that they were ready to do the install and scheduled it for 8 am yesterday. I walked to work in the morning, and the technician was at the door 5 minutes before 8. I met him as I was...

One of my goals this year is to get up to speed on authentication and authorization in my applications. A lot of things have changed since the days when you would use forms authentication and have a database with users and groups defined. Today an application can be separated across a number of technologies. You could have a website that works for some pieces, a single page app for others, and then a mobile app for your phone users. Each app could have different requirements for access to resources and use different methods. Building a security system from scratch can work for smaller apps with simple requirements, but for complicated requirements, using a framework can resolve a lot of problems.  In the next series of posts, I will be doing a deep dive into the Identity 4 framework as well as ASP.NET Core Identity. As of this writing, I am barely a novice using these technologies, but I have been learning a lot about them, and I am experimenting with how to...

Work / Life balance is always a tough thing for me to figure out. I truly enjoy working, and I love learning new things, so there is a pretty gray area for me between working and not. There are times where I am happy the weather is miserable because I can work on a piece of code that has given me trouble or a project without feeling guilty for not being outside on a sunny day. I do enjoy outdoor activities as well, so finding time to fit everything together can be really tough.  In general, I put work as my highest priority. At the end of the day, if I don't have a job, I am not going to have much of a life. When a company pays me for my services, I feel a sense of loyalty to them.  Years ago when I owned a restaurant, I would often hear an employee complaining about some task, and they would say something like "I don't get paid enough to do ...". I told my son at the time that when you agree to take a job, you agree on the amount of money you are going to be p...

For the past few years, I have thought about getting an office in town. I typically work at my customers' site, but there are days I work remotely, and I'm usually not on site on Fridays. When I work remote, I have an office in my home, and it isn't bad, but I do run into a couple of issues. Sometimes there are distractions with being at home, and it is hard to get into the working mode. On the other side, there are times where I spend all day in the office plugging away at some pieces of code, and I don't see another living soul. If I do this for more than a day or two, I can get the feeling of being really isolated. There is no doubt that I am an introvert and I don't really struggle with being alone, but I do feel that I need to at least have some cursory interactions with people on a daily basis.  I had a few criteria for getting an office. I wanted it to be within walking distance of my house, close to one of the downtown areas,...