About Alan Barber

First of all I would like to thank you for visiting my informational site. I hope that this site has helped you learn more about who I am. I guess you could consider this page sort of a coverletter for me.

Introduction:

My name is Alan Barber. I am an Ohio native, born and raised. I root for the Ohio State Buckeyes, Cleveland Browns and Cleveland Indians. I used to be quite the avid gamer but have waned in the last few years do to being busy with work.

I started programming when I was about ten years old. My family had an Epson 286 12Mhz w/ 4mb of ram and MS-Dos 3.22. I used to play a game called MathBlaster(tm). The original version was writing in gwbasic. You had to start the gwbasic interpreter then stick in the mathblaster game disc and type run “color” to start the color version of the game. Occasionally I would mess up and mis-type this and got syntax error messages. One day I found the manual for GWBasic trying to figure out what this “syntax error” stuff was and became introduced to some sample code. From that day on I was hooked!

Technical Skills:

My current title is “Senior Programmer” but I’m really a jack of all trades. I do system programming, web programming, Network Administration, PBX Administration, Server Administration and I even program phone survey systems. My forte is in Microsoft technologies but I have dealt with and used many different technologies over the years.

Community:

I am active in the technology community and regularly attend conferences and user group meetings. I have meet and spoken with hundreds of amazing and wonderful people. I enjoy learning and sharing with fellow technology professionals and enthusiasts. Thanks to my participation in the community I have formed great friendships with many people.

Speaking / Writing:

I am current not an active speaker but I am in the process of putting together my first topic that I hope to present to my local user group before the end of the year. My goal is to be a regular on the speaking circuit and I would be honored to get to present at a regional conference within another year or two.

I have a blog where I post about both personal and technical topics. One of my life goals is to write and publish a technical book and I hope my blog writing will help me find my voice and writing style.