Let there be blogs!

Hello and welcome to the Avail website version 3! At least I think we are on our third website. We aren't web developers, so we're learning as we go (thanks for hanging in there with us!). Before this site we were on an incredibly slow, spartan, feature-rich site. Being a relatively small team with day jobs, families, school, and non-computer related hobbies (board games, martial arts, and music, just to name a few), we didn't quite have the time to fuss with a more complex feature-rich content management system to make our site super fast (creating a new language wholesale takes time!). And before that, for website iteration one, we were on Google Code. Thanks Google!

In the past iterations as well as the current one, many hours of hard work has gone into making this happen. Many thanks to Leslie and Spencer for making this site and, as a result, this blog possible! Oh and I think Todd did some copying and pasting or some such stuff too.

So what sorts of stuff can you expect to see in my upcoming blog entries? Well, being a big fan of honesty and transparency, I know for certain what the contents of some of the blogs will be. You see, I actually started writing some blogs back in October of 2012 on our previous site. Some of them were pretty good and some were fairly pointless. I will be porting over the blogs I wrote...well, the good ones at least. I respect your time as a reader and I have no desire to waste a single minute of it! Some of my previously written blogs were instructional and seem to fit in our newly created Learn section of the site. I'll be editing the content to fit the format established there, so look for another tutorial or two coming soon.

So what exactly will you get out of my blogs? You'll get to ride along as I perform various functions for Avail. I'll not bore you with the details of what customer service reps I sat on hold with nor what hoops I had to jump through in the process of running the Avail Foundation. No, it is my intent to let you look in on the most interesting of my endeavors (I hope): my programming exploits. Keep in mind that I'm new to the programming trade. Before moving to Madison I was an analyst; I worked mostly with SAS and SQL. In my current job, I do some Smalltalk on a database application development platform as well as dabbling in web development (a bit o' Javascript) for our web-based database applications. I've fiddled with C ever so briefly (courtesy of Todd circa 2001), but most recently I've programmed Java (meddling some with the Avail vm) and experimented with Python. In high school, I even took a class on FORTRAN...that I did on paper by hand (my teacher would look at my loose leaf paper program and declare its correctness; he was quite the compiler). So it is safe to say that, of all the languages I know, I know Avail the best! So follow along the exploits of a math nerd that is learning to program in a newly developed language.

Welcome to my blog!