About

Hi,

I'm Maria, a full time techie in a large secondary school that's highly innovative in it's use of IT.  One of only three members of staff looking after a huge network of PC's, laptops, Macs, Servers and some of the most destructive users known to admins (school kids), all on a shoe-string budget, I try and fit a little coding in and around my work hours when I can.

This blog's purpose is to provide a showcase of projects I've worked on, currently working on, and plan to make a start on.  My coding background started way back in 1987, where I got to use a BBC Micro in junior school to write a program to calculate areas of a rectangle.  I hogged the computer on it's trolley for the rest of the day, and wrote programs to work out the areas of other 2D and 3D shapes as well.

I then copied a program out of a book at home on my Commodore 16, but had a syntax error and my Dad wanted to watch the snooker so I never did get that program finished.  That was the end of my child programming empire unfortunately :(

I picked up the programming bug again when I went back to education on an 'Access to Higher Education' course, where we made a 'spell the word' game for little kids in Visual Basic.  I then went on to Uni for two years, and studied Systems Analysis and Design and Programming, where I got to learn all about Java.  The highlight of this time has to be spending almost two years studying a language, only to be told our final project was to be carried out using HTML, XML, XSLT and XPATH instead!  Yeah, that was fun!

Being as dumb as I am, I told my first IT manager that I'd coded a bit before, and he set me to work on creating an inventory system in his favourite language - classic ASP.  And he wanted to see what could be achieved with xml, rather than storing data in a database, as an experiment.  It should be noted that this guy was an ASP legend.  We had this horrible, badly written, barely English system that run off a unix server that did production stuff like count completed magazines off a production line.  Somehow, he tweaked this thing to output CSV files, which he had spreadsheets that auto-grabbed the data, formatted it, put it into various databases, then ASP pages that turned it into pretty, management-pleasing graphs and tables.  In awe of his master programming skills, I didn't feel up to telling him I thought XML sucked for data storage!  The result was a bit of a mess, but impressed the manager enough to let me stay for 6 months in a two week placement.

I got another job - my current one - and having still not learned when to shut up, I let it slip that I could code a little.  I carried out a stint as web dev for the school's website.  The highlight of the project for me was a backend system that used XML (I had no database access) to track unique visitors, and was able to make the colour scheme claret and blue!  However, design is not my strong point, and I was glad to hand the whole task over to an external company.


I then made use of my newly acquired ASP skills and made a ticket-reporting type system.  Users could log requests, which could then be assigned to staff, and then completed, with feedback to the user.  It worked well, and I was really proud of my little system.  The first one I wrote which made it into the user's hands.  Unfortunately, users would rather shout their requests in the corridor, or send a student with a note, or even just assume 'we can guess what they want without them telling us and why haven't we done it yet?'  So we went back to the old fashioned, but working method of writing stuff on a whiteboard.

In an attempt to broaden my skills a little, and because linux hosting is cheaper, I taught myself some PHP.  I created a really cool PHP / MySQL site to advertise my now ex's window cleaning site, with a contact form and feedback section.  This site is no longer live, but trust me - it was good!

Having a break from coding, I gave it another look at recently.  I've just completed a consumables (Toners, Keyboards, Mice) tracker system.  This is going live sometime this week, and I'll be hosting it on a Mac OS Server, using MAMP, viewable within the network only.  I'll be writing up a post on this very soon, but I'm hoping to recruit someone to help me tweak the look of the system first (Will code for design tips.  And food).

I've got a couple of new projects planned, time permitting, and I look forward to sharing them with you all soon.

When I'm not helping sixth-form kids from the terror of corrupted A* thesis, and plugging cables back in, thus 'fixing the Internet', I'm looking after my monster child, attempting to study Sharepoint 2010, decide on my next Open University module, and run round punching, kicking and shouting in a funny white suit, and I have another blog over at For God So Loved The World.

Speak soon

Maria :)