Brendon covered this interview for me, as I was once again struck down by the plague. This time I went to the doctor’s office for a quick once over and some meds. With all the antibiotics rampaging through me by now, I’ll be healthy as an ox. Or at least as healthy as I was before I got the plague.
Chris Wallace is the star of the inaugural publication of “Tales from the Trenches” brought to you by the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys. Chris met with Brendon at the Visual Basic.Net UG meeting and hung out afterwards for the traditional pilgrimage to Chili’s for food, beer, and more talk. I want to thank both of them for braving the terrible weather and adjusting to the fluctuating schedules of everyone involved.
Chris is a .Net developer and the brains behind the Tamasii.com blog which was, until recently, hosted by DotNetJunkies. Working for the Gwinnett Hospital Systems as a senior systems analyst, Chris has helped his department tremendously with his knowledge of .Net development. Read on for a synopsis of Brendon’s interview.
“Do all programmers watch CSI and Without a Trace or is it just that me? Chris and I are that cool and we have a lot in common. It appears he works on computers all the time (like 18 hours a day) and still enjoys learning – file this fact under “What Brendon and Chris have in common”. Yes I know you work more than 18 hours a day on the computer; put your name in the comments and maybe I will talk with you next. =)
Let me tell you, this guy is a one man shop. We talked about how he has control of the servers that he works on and how this is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a curse because he has to maintain them, but he has the ability to change whatever he needs for his applications.
We were talking about how he used to be hosted on DotNetJunkies and would blog there, but changed over to his new site (www.tasamii.com) where he has made some modifications (or mods, for those cool people) to his version of .Text. He switched his web host over to http://www.webhost4life.com which really looks like a great deal for unlimited bandwidth. He said since his switch he has seen a little bit of drop off in the number people that read his blog, but he is hoping that people just haven’t totally moved over yet. Move People! Move!
I was going to ask the standard questions that people wanted us to ask, but he was such a nice guy and kept the conversation moving so well that he answered those things without me having to ask. You wanted to know things like, “Why did he pick .NET?” Well, he had been working on HTML, ASP, and VB and it was simply the logical next step. Actually one reason he moved to it is that he has a web app that hits the server about once every minute or so. Now this started out with a client size of about 10, but then grew to be a ton of people so he need a performance boost. .NET gave him that boost by cutting his CPU performance from 80% utilization to under 45%. He can comment on the actual numbers if I got them wrong.
Chris’s current project is a scheduling app that uses colored buttons to tell different type of information. Something cool that he is working on now is reading about GDI+ and he is going to come up with a way to create the button from different colors on the fly and different text from the database so he doesn’t have to create a graphic every time there is a need for a new button color. I had asked him if he worked on any mobility or tablet pc or anything and unfortunately he hadn’t, but he said he is going to buy one at the beginning of March and he did have a cool Blackberry phone that he showed me my website from at the restaurant. After seeing that, I guess Matt and I better work on making it more mobility friendly.”
— Matt Ranlett