Monday, November 30, 2009

Introduction

Welcome to Code#. This blog will evolve into a series of HOWTOs, critical articles, implementation examples, and so on gleaned from my career in IT, especially software development and using open source software. Hopefully this will become a useful resource for others and myself in the future.

I have tinkered with electronics, computers and code for as long as I can remember. Since starting out at a small local computer shop in 1998, I have worked for Expression Networks, LLC in various roles including CTO, did a short stint as a contractor at Capital One, and landed at IOTA Solutions, LLC in 2012, where I am developing the next generation of MyClassEvaluation (online course evaluation software).

I am also President and CEO of Overlord Industries LLC, an entertainment production startup (website coming soon).

These days, I use a lot of open source software to build applications and have been running Linux on my personal laptops since 2005. I still write apps in C#/ASP.NET and I think .NET is an excellent platform, but the past few years of working with FOSS have really been a pleasant experience and have informed my worldview. I now believe that open source software is a viable and exciting business model for the future, for reasons which I'll detail in a future article.

My free software kick really began years ago I decided to install an inbound SMTP gateway to take load (traffic, spam scanning, etc.) off of Expression Networks' struggling Windows-based POP3/IMAP mail servers. These servers hosted about 25000 users on many domains and the volume of spam was an effective DoS at certain times. I settled on Exim for an MTA and FreeBSD for the OS. I soon discovered that the industrial-strength configurability of every aspect of Exim makes an incredibly powerful gateway, and I was hooked. Nothing other than open source software gives the user such complete control over configuration and execution.

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