About Alan P. Barber

First of all I would like to thank you for visiting my site. I hope that this site has helped you learn more about who I am both as a professional developer and as a person.

Introduction:

My name is Alan Barber. I am an Ohio native, born and raised. I root for the Ohio State Buckeyes, Cleveland Browns and Cleveland Indians. I used to be quite the avid gamer but have waned in the last few years, due to being busy with work.

I started programming when I was about ten years old. My family had an Epson 286 12Mhz w/ 4mb of ram running MS-Dos 3.22. I used to play a game called MathBlaster(tm). The original version was writing in GWBasic. You had to start the GWBasic interpreter then stick in the MathBlaster (tm) game floppy disc and type run “color” to start the 8bit color version of the game. Occasionally I would mess up and miss-type this and would get this strange message “syntax error”. One day I found the manual for GWBasic trying to figure out what this “syntax error” stuff was and was introduced to some sample code. From that day on I was hooked and started my life as a coder!

Technical Skills:

My current title is “.Net Consultant” but I’m really a jack of all trades. I have done; system programming, web programming, Network Administration, PBX Administration, Server Administration and I even program phone survey systems. My forte is in Microsoft technologies, specifically C# and SQL Server, but I have dealt with and used many different technologies over the years.

Community:

I am active in the technology community and regularly attend conferences and user group meetings. I have meet and spoken with hundreds of amazing and wonderful people. I enjoy learning and sharing with fellow technology professionals and enthusiasts. Thanks to my participation in the community I have formed great friendships with many people.

Speaking / Writing:

I am current not an active speaker but I am in the process of putting together my first topic that I hope to present to my local user group sometime soon. My goal is to be a regular on the speaking circuit and I would be honored to get to present at a regional conference.

Obviously, I have this site where I blog about technical topics. One of my life goals is to write and publish a technical book and I hope my blog writing will help me find my voice and writing style.