My name is Mark Hildreth. As of this post, I am 23, and currently work as a software programmer creating in-house software for a local business in Massachusetts, USA. Although I graduated from college and started full time work over a year and a half ago, I still consider myself “coming to speed” in my knowledge of creating stable, maintainable, enterprise software.
I can’t remember exactly what drove me to the .NET platform after my college so grounded me in C++ and Java, but here I am, and enjoying it. The business I work for is pretty laid back, and suits my style well. They run mainly on a legacy mainframe, but welcome my interest in more modern development. However, for the most part I’m on my own with concepts such as Object-Oriented Programming, Unit Testing, Revision Control, SQL Database Administration, HTML & CSS, etc. In short, I will be wearing a lot of hats.
It wasn’t always this way. My first few projects have been learning to use VBA macros to create reports in excel. For the short-range, these were fun, but later when I was responsible for creating a more advanced program, involving user input, creating my own database, etc., I quickly found many things to be getting far too complicated. As such, I started looking at various resources online to improve my process. Along the way, I’ve learned about tiered programming, Separation of Concern, Unit Testing and TDD, Inversion of Control, DDD and other things that make creating new software a little bit less strange.
As such, I’ve decided to start work on this blog. Some of the topics will be of the “eureka” moments of what I’ve been doing wrong. Hopefully, these might help others that might also be traveling my path. Other topics might be new things I want to try out in the hopes to receive comments.
For the most part, I use C#, NHibernate and the Castle stack, including Windsor for IoC and MonoRail for MVC. Another thing I've been looking into as a side project is game development in Silverlight.
Besides programming, I also play pickup Ultimate Frisbee in Northampton, MA, participate in community theatre, jump in puddles, craft run-on sentences, and watch horrible movies (preferably with the aid of a RiffTrax).