Finally got one of these for work

I now have a blog for work related things, finally. I found my company's "Social Media & Blogging Guidelines," document and we're allowed to blog. We have to keep things appropriate, of course, but otherwise we are golden.

So I work for GE Energy, NuclearGE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy Americas (ed: name change as of 4 June 2007) as a software engineer. I'm the responsible engineer for codes ranging from FORTRAN 77/90, K&R C, C++, VB, VB.Net, Java, and C# 2.0. Mostly I work on GUI's (C# and Java) and support libraries (C, C++, FORTRAN, C#, Java), however, being a jack of many trades I also get in on the technology codes in FORTRAN.

Our systems range from Windows 2000 and XP on the desktop, Windows 2000 and 2003 on the servers, OpenVMS 7.X and 8.X servers, and a few scattered Linux/HP-UX/Tru64 boxen. We're trying to consolidate all of these systems, but personally I would rather the effort be placed on insuring interoperability across all of them (while least common denominator programming is at times frustrating, it keeps your code simple and most of the time easier to debug).

I spend a lot of time ensuring that our software remains well integrated, mainly utilizing API's which were set in stone before I was born. I get called upon to debug the crazy situations which happen when you bring together such an unholy trinity as FORTRAN, C, and C#. Yet the work is challenging and fun; my biggest grief being hard to find bugs and managing to break things which should not break. Ok, I lied, my biggest grief is procedures, but I think any engineer will tell you that.

I will be posting lots of technical issues that I come across and how I made it around them (or why I cannot seem to get around them). We'll see how this goes.