Derek Watson

So I just completed my first week as a full-time software developer at Adbase, and I think it’s going pretty well. Adbase sells a database of marketing contacts to photographers and illustrators. They have been filling this niche for a little over a decade, and seem like a fairly solid fixture in the industry. My role is to squash bugs and develop new features in their database and web application tiers.

For the last decade I have worked for a handful of web application development shops, startup.coms and freelance clients. These sorts of projects typically ended up in the open-source realm, built on Linux operating systems, Apache webservers and MySQL or Postgres databases. Open-source programming languages such as Java, PHP, Perl and Python seemed so ubiquitous, I figured the whole world must be using them. I had developed a kind of second-nature comfort with these packages and have even become a bit of an advocate for their adoption.

I learned quickly that Adbase does things in a different way. They are a Microsoft shop. “Barf bags are over there” said Nelson Nunes, CEO after breaking the news of their vilified software vendor to me. I figured Nelson had heard it all before, so my I decided to keep quiet.

But things aren’t that bad, as it turns out Microsoft’s .NET platform is actually quite nice. I think I’m going to really enjoy enjoy writing in C#. Over the christmas holidays I picked up a copy of Programming C# by O’Reilly Media (thanks Greg & Meredith!) and spent some time with it. O’Reilly makes great books. They are always comprehensive without ever dumbing it down too much. After a couple passes through that one and a few test applications, I feel I have a solid grasp on what looks like a very clean, robust language.

The Adbase office is at Bathurst and College, a convenient walking distance from my house. I spent my first week there learning SQL Server, writing TSQL procedures and getting a general grasp of their data schema. I completed a few assignments and even had some code commited and launched, which is a nice thing for your first week. Here’s hoping my Dell workstation arrives soon!