Beginning the development, past present and future ....

In the past i have done various different types of development ....

As a graduate i worked in the SCADA engineering area and developed modules for realtime systems more specifically control systems for the electrical industry. I used to develop some of the bearer modules that communicated with the remote RTU's and used to develop some of the monitoring processes that would generate alarms when various components out in the field failed.

As a graduate the work in SCADA was great. My experience in this industry taught me alot and opened up alot of doors. You may think that SCADA is a very specialized field (which it is) but if you look at it from an IT perspective it covers alot of key areas.

- The requirement for redundancy
- Mission critical applications
- Required quick response times
- Protocols and communications
- Communications with external devices
- Realtime processing
- etc etc ...

As a graduate usually the menial jobs are passed on and all we get are the crappy repetative development roles but the development that i was doing was exciting. Along with development of code and i also go a view of how infrastructure is built to support realtime mission critical systems, something that i dearly value when looking back as it was experience that would contribute to my future roles.

Most of my development here was in C and C++ with alot of database work and work with different protocols used in the SCADA industry such as DNP and Baker.

I did various other support roles in different industries over time and i had a good technical background because of this experience.

Over time i moved into purely infrastructure work and initially did work as a unix/linux engineer and also started to get into network engineering through my own studies of cisco technology. It was great cause infrastructure work makes way for alot of travelling and as a young dude travelling for work is ideal. I was able to get into infrastructure work (initially) because i had experience when i was a graduate working on the SCADA systems infrastructure doing the basic network setup, configuring and setting up all the linux and sun servers along with the (at the time) windows 2000 servers.

Over time my development work decreased other then perl and shell along with some basic C and my infrastructure work started to increase until eventually i didnt do any more development except for unix shell.

So what does this have to do with the garage datacenter build and the development of the software to be housed by the garage datacenter ...... ?!? Well everything ......

See when you have done development before you think that you will never loose what you know, you developed throughout university, you developed in the early stages of your career, you look at code and you understand it, but for me anyway ... it did start to slip away and when i came to begin developing the application to be housed in the garage datacenter it didnt flow like it used to.

At the time when i was developing web applications they mostly consisted of cgi scripts (very complicated ones) to do alot of what is now support by the various frameworks. Now we have great technology such as ajax, XML and alot of remote communication libraries are built into the standard release of various programming languages, the problem was i had no idea about these and had to begin the learning processes again (dont get me wrong though ... it was fun and i enjoyed it).

After considering various frameworks and building all the sample applications from each of the frameworks such as django, ruby on rails, turbogears, zope and all the others i settled for a slightly different option and im glad i took the alternative route.

The development now is going well (i believe) and i feel i am comfortable with the option that i have chosen. Development happens everynight after dinner which is about 7:30pm - 8:00pm and extends to about 12:00am - 1:00am depending on how sleepy or how close i am to completing a certain module. I enjoy the development because its a great change from the mind numbing conversatios i have at work regarding issues that are really none issues but creates work and makes people look busy.

I can pretty much speak for all the members of the garage datacenter team when i say, i think we all enjoy the garage alot more then our day to day jobs. We thank the man upstairs we have them to support this venture but we all hope to be able to do something more worth while in the future to come ..