Hello World! Welcome to CodingCris.com!

When I first started programming, my girlfriend says it looked like I was depressed. All I would do is go to work, read, workout, read, go home, read, go to bed, and then do it all over again. (side note: unbeknownst to me, I think all the ingredients in the pre-workout drinks I would take helped me focus and study.)

Programming is tough if you don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe it was the fact that I jumped into deep end. I didn’t even know how to ask a question. Each scenario is specific to what you’re working on, so you can’t ask “Hey, Google, how do I stop the variable s_EmployeeEmail from being overwritten in every loop? Is it because I’m parsing it from s_Person?”. Without knowing the fundamental concepts, it’s like diving into a cave, with no visibility, no light and no rescue rope. Yeah, there is a way out, but the possibility of you finding it is next to nil.

What would’ve really helped me is if I had someone speak to me in simple terms. Someone who knew that I knew nothing and then guided me to safety. That would have saved me so much frustration. We didn’t all go to school for computer science. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn enough to get into and succeed in a technical field.

This website is here to tell a complete story. It’ll start at the very beginning. I’ll tell you how a person who knew nothing about programming got into it. From the interview, the mindset, philosophies, concepts, and then, ultimately, the nitty-gritty: coding tips, documentation, and tutorials. I’m extremely proud of what I know. The details are important because it was the daily grind of collecting a few grains of sand, day in and day out, that helped me build this beautiful beach. The beach is a paradise of a career that I’ve built for myself. I love what I do and I want to share it with you.

The topics may seem to be very wide in range, and they are, but I believe that the barrier to entry for non-technical people into technical conversations is a little higher than need be. Therefore, I’m trying to bring you along no matter where you’re currently at. Also, I find that blogs and sites dedicated to technical fields focus too much on the hard skills. We’re human too and go through non-technical problems. (Trust me, your resident programmer is more than a cave person. They’re social creatures in their own special way 😀 )

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

That quote will be the guiding light for this website. Many of the posts will be conceptual, theoretical, and written as short stories. This high-level view will help ease you into the conversation. Ultimately, we will end up talking about hard skills.

Once again, I love what I do. I’ve made an amazing living in a field called “Business Intelligence” (BI). It’s problem solving, it’s math, it’s analytical, it’s business-oriented, it’s interaction, it’s presentations, it’s everything. Variety is the spice of life, and, boy, does BI have it! In tech terms: it has front-end development, back-end development, data warehouses, data mining, reporting, yadda, yadda, yadda!! Whew!!! It has it all and you can go wherever you want with it.

Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage. Maybe you upgrade your skills, get a raise, apply for a new job, or just find entertainment in my style of writing and humor. It’s my absolute pleasure to have you and if I can help someone, someway, somehow, that would be amazing and I thank you for allowing me to do so.

Action matters most, so let’s get started!