I am Timothy Andrew Eaton, but I go by my super secret alter ego of Andy. I am a father, a husband, a nerd, a outdoorsman, and I do this thing called coding for fun and profit.
The person who tolerates me on a day to day basis and has yet to kill me in my sleep is my loving wife Erin. Together we have seven kids. Four of them furry, and three of them not so furry. The three not so furry ones are our twins, Ethan and Rachel and the bane of their existence, their little brother Will. The furry ones are two cats named Gladys and Gandalf, a little yappy mutt dog named Yoda, and their giant brother (English Mastiff currently at about 200lbs and still a puppy) Meatloaf.
I went to collage to be a network administrator and was Novell Admin for a little while at a Title Insurance company prior to the housing bubble collapse. Post collapse, that company doesn't exist anymore and neither did my job. At this point I discovered that I was one of many of newly unemployed network admins on the market and by far the least experienced.
Demand wasn't high for Network Admins and I needed to pay rent, so I took a position at Sprint as a Provisioner I. A nice fancy title for someone who could breathe and knew how to use a keyboard. What we did was take requests from a client cable company getting into VOIP Phone service and setup new telephone numbers for their customers and ported their customers existing telephone numbers from other companies. In my mind, it was a foot in the door to a big tech company that would provide me with a paycheck and the ability to grow with the company. It did that and did it well for a few years. I moved from being a provisioner of orders for VOIP, to being a Subject Matter Expert on the entire processes for a team, to becoming a processes analyst that refined Sprints processes for handling VOIP Provisioning and Number Porting. From that position I was able to do some international traveling and training. I spent a few weeks in New Delhi, India training about a hundred people in 4 different teams to provision VOIP and Port Telephone numbers. When I got back, I got a nice award, a bonus, and to watch a few hundred of my co-workers and friends get laid off thanks to my efforts. A few months later I was asked by a former manager if I wanted to come over to a Shadow IT team and learn to code. I knew next to nothing about coding outside of Excel Macros, but he thought that I could handle it and I saw it as a chance to get back into more formal IT. Two weeks after I joined his shadow IT team, the Process Analyst team I was on, got laid off. He saved me from the unemployment line.
Shadow IT is what happens in a company when an IT department can't move fast enough and/or the project doesn't get financial approval due to budget issues but still needs to happen and needs to happen quickly. This team had already been working on several VB.Net Windows Form applications that I had documented and used previously. None of programmers in the room had any formal education on programming. The team literally started when a provisioner decided that doing provisioning manually sucked and he knew enough about VB to write a small application that didn't get detected by Sprints security software that would do his job for him. The way they taught me to code was to install Visual Studio on my computer, map me to the network drive where the raw code was and give me access to the trouble ticket system. They basically pointed me to a list of reported issues and the source code and told me good luck. This sink or swim method of learning to code became one of the main reasons why I have enjoyed being a developer.
I taught myself VB.Net and Windows Forms and got along well with the relaxed environment and the almost perpetual challenge. I survived another two layoffs and then Sprint sold their entire network division to Ericsson. Ericsson decided that installing applications on a sketchy computer in India was not something they wanted to deal with and decided to convert all of the desktop applications we had into web applications. They sent myself and another developer to collage for a one week crash course on Web Forms. We came back and I spent the next few months re-writing every desktop application we had. The other developer decided that he didn't like web forms and went back to just maintaining desktop applications. I converted his applications as well. He got hit in the next layoff. Then came the meeting that marked the end of my time with Sprint/Ericsson. My manager pulled me aside as asked me to take a trip back to New Delhi and teach a bunch of developers how to maintain and take over development of all of the applications I had converted. It was the end of my job and the jobs of several of my friends. I asked for 48 hours to think it over and discuss it with my wife. I updated my resume and handed it out like free balloons at Chuck-E-Cheese. By the end of the 48 hours I had a job offer making twice what I was at Sprint/Ericsson. I politely declined the trip and handed in my notice.
RosNet was/is a Cold Fusion shop converting their software to C# and MVC. When they contracted/hired me they had only one other VB developer (the manager) and no one using C# or MVC. My first task was to learn C# and MVC as quickly as possible so we could start working on the next generation of their software. Sink or Swim... I swam. I Converted from VB to C# in about a week and in another two I had MVC3 pretty well understood. They introduced me to their version of Agile Scrum (Water-Scrum-FaIl). It was an interesting and challenging situation, from which I learned a lot and when the contract ended I decided to take that experience somewhere else.
This was the first time I had another developer above me that was willing to educate me and introduce me to the processes that most development shops follow. There I learned about the requirements gathering process, how to tech design out projects to a level of small 4 hour tasks that could be completed independently, what a code review was and how they allowed for growth for both people involved. I was also introduced to a functional style of Scrum, and how working on a team could accelerate the process of bring a product to market. This was the company where I started to really look at development as the career I wanted to pursue and be passionate about. I started perusing education on my own through online resources like PluralSight. I started to give back to the community through mentorship of kids through Coder Dojo KC and of adult friends both currently in the industry and looking to get into the industry. Eventually I got to the point where I felt that it was time to move onto other companies, projects, and new challenges.
This is where I am now. I like the change and the challenge. I like the sink or swim aspect of coming into a company and ramping up quickly to help them accomplish their goals. I like the ability to jump from technology to technology and continue to learn and grow as a developer. It has taught me how important Clean Code is and how to be a S.O.L.I.D. developer.
