Jerry Dodge

Louisville, KY

jdsoftwareinc.com

Age: 27

I'm mainly a Delphi dev. I work for a software company which does solutions for retail management, including inventory, POS, reporting, BI, Tags, and more. It's been in Delphi since Delphi's been around.

I've known Delphi for about 4 years now, and before that, I had learned VB6. I havn't gone back to VB since I learned Delphi. I also taught myself QBasic and HTML as a kid. It hasn't been until the past 5 years that I've been diving into programming.

I have no official education in programming, other than an introductory class in High School to Visual Basic 6. After that class, I taught myself VB6 for a while, until I laid my eyes on Delphi. Since then, I've aborted anything I've written in VB and gone to Delphi.

Since then I've also become vaguely familiar with ASP.NET with C#, as well as some C# windows apps. But I'm not too fond of the whole .NET idea. .NET is good for web platforms and such, but not for win apps. I have built a number of web applications including JavaScript and AJAX.

Experience:

  • Delphi 7 - XE2 - Primary
  • SQL Server 2000+ - Intermediate
  • ASP.NET - Learning
  • C# (with ASP.NET) - Learning
  • C# Windows Apps - Rarely
  • Javascript, HTML, CSS, etc. - Learning
  • VB6 - First language, Never

Some of my projects:

  • Image Loader Component - Loads images in threads, and maintains a cache for performance
  • Server/Client Command Sockets - Custom TCP sockets with login, cookies, etc.
  • Chat/Messenger Server/Client component suite - everything needed to build a chat system - all non-visual functionality for managing chat server/client.
  • Customizable needle gauge - flexible gauge control for multiple needles, tick marks, etc.
  • Fast drawing graph similar to the ones in the Windows Task Manager
  • Remote Desktop Surveillance System - View/control numerous desktops at once through central server
  • More components include a 3D label, glass label, glass button, glass form (otherwise a glass drawing library), and other simple visual controls.
  • More apps include alarm clocks, NFL game betting system, jukebox, and more.
  • A few websites including the one posted to the left (needs updating)

My strengths:

  • Understanding the bigger picture of projects
  • Writing Custom Classes
  • Code organization (within unit)
  • Writing purely independent classes (as opposed to cross-referencing)
  • User Friendly GUI's
  • Developer Friendly Classes

My weaknesses:

  • Implementing a Database
  • Using and Building API's
  • Defining proper types (such as when to use PChar vs. String)
  • Lower-level coding (such as ASM)
  • Originally structuring projects to make expansion easy
  • Multithreading

PS - My noted website is 100% purely coded my myself in C#, and is my core testing grounds for web development - which I have a lot of brushing up to do.

It's always nice to know you're able to do something, even if you never use it.