Two times I #HitRefresh

I’ve been an independent, consultant since 1993. Which means it’s coming up to the 25th anniversary of the first time I #HitRefresh on my career. At that time I was working as an employee with a fairly large data centre in the financial industry, primarily writing teller systems in C for the Credit Unions of Ontario. At this time these systems ran on DOS and OS\2. I #HitRefresh by moving into the consulting world building applications for Windows written in PowerBuilder.

The second time I #HitRefresh was around 2000 when I latched onto the .net wave and learned C# and the .net framework. Along with many other new and exciting tools. Most important to me Team Foundation Server.

This was a big change from the world I had become accustomed. My friend and colleague Barry Gervin and I started speaking at user groups, attending the PDC conferences and going to each others house once a week to teach each other different parts of the .net framework. We eventually started a company that helped out customers adopt this technology. That was the beginning of ObjectSharp Consulting. We offered consulting and training. Some of that training we authored, and some was Microsoft Official Curriculum.

Although there have been many #HitRefresh moments in my career this was the biggest one. I am sure there will be more. Looking back it amazes me how this industry has changed since the mid 80’s when I began writing code. 

This post is part of a series of #HitRefresh moments. Read more at www.HitRefreshbook.com.