Its been a long time since I've posted anything other than links and quite a bit has happened in the past few months, so here is an update on some of the interesting stuff.

Taking classes

Last fall I started taking classes towards a masters in Software Engineering at Seattle University.  I had two classes the fall quarter - Object Oriented Concepts and Software Requirements.  Both were good and practical.  I probably could have tested out of the Object Oriented Concepts class, but thought I would take it to fill in some of the gaps I might have - like a good overview of what is included under the umbrella of the term 'polymorphism'.  So I got to look at things in a different manner ... which I has really seemed to help me in certain ways.  In the Software Requirements course, we covered the majority of Karl Wiegers' book Software Requirements and created a software requirements document applying what we learned from the book to a real world example.  This quarter I have the next two classes in the curriculum:  Data Structures & Algorithms and Software Modeling.  So far my opinion of the classes are the same as last quarter - good and practical. However the practical-ness of mathematically being able to prove the efficiency of an algorithm maybe pushing it - but it does seem to be quite challenging and really an in depth look at algorithms in general.  The Software Modeling class picks up where the Software Requirements class ended - so we are now taking that spec to the next level (creating wireframes, navigation maps, conceptual information model, event model, etc.) - which again seems very practical ... the downside of these classes are I have a lot less free time these days.

Switching jobs

This next Monday, I start a new job at Safeco in their R&D division (Open Seas).  I was at Infospace (now Motricity) for only around a year and a half.  The people I worked with were all great and the projects were always challenging, but I think it is time for me to get back to creating software that work in the financial services domain (as opposed to the mobile portals I worked on at Infospace).  While at Infospace I got to do quite a bit of custom asp.net controls for the first few months ... nothing like writing a great useful asp.net control.  After working on the UI side for awhile, I moved to the backend/middle tier side of things - which allowed me to focus on improving my coding skills with services and databases (TSql) - plus some quality unit testing and refactoring ... again something that really made me feel good about the quality of work being created. 

Making an effort in getting up to date

I'm not an early adopter by any means ... especially not compared to friends of mine like Sam Gentile or Aaron Weiker.  Part of the reason I haven't paid much attention to new stuff is due to the lack of necessity - if I don't use it at work, it is hard to find the time to learn the new stuff.  So this week I've been reading about Asp.net Ajax, MVC and some of the other newer stuff I just haven't had time to play with .... but will hopefully be using in my new job.  Now I'm redesigning my web site ... the current version is still in .net 1.1 -> which I don't even have installed on my desktop.

That's some of the bigger things that have been going on with me.  Hopefully I'll start writing more in my blog - I know I've been saying that for a while ... but with the new job I'm going to be getting 5 - 8 hours back a week that I use to spend sitting in traffic ... so I might actually find the time now :)