MeI am James Dalton, and this is my blog about computers and math. My love of math started in the 7th grade with pre-algebra. By the time I graduated high school I had taken every math class they offered. My first computer was a TI 99/4A in ‘82. I would hook it up to the family TV and used a tape recorder to save the programs I copied out of magazines.

I earned a BS in Computer Science with a minor in Math from JMU in ‘91. I had originally wanted that the other way around or a double major. Unfortunately, math and I parted ways when the numbers disappeared from the book. I still love math, but advanced calculus was all about the theories and the proofs always seemed like circular logic to me. Never did understand it.

After college I did a stint as a VBA developer. Not exactly the most glamorous job, but I was able to use Microsoft Access to teach myself SQL. After that, my life revolved around Oracle databases one way or another, writing Pro*C/C++ and PL/SQL programs for 3 different employers. I also worked on the other side of the fence for a while as a Unix Admin and Oracle DBA. Ultimately decided that was not for me and went back to development. I wrote way too much VB6 code. There are two languages I really dislike. VB and COBOL, I managed to avoid COBOL, wish I could say the same for VB. It did lead to me learning C# and .Net so it wasn’t all bad. I have dabbled in a lot of languages over the years, sometimes just for fun (Haskell, Closure, Lisp, Go), sometimes for work (Python, Scala, Pearl, JavaScript.)

These days I mainly work with C#, JavaScript, Docker and Kubernetes as a Software Architect at GE Digital on Predix APM. (For the record this is my personal blog with my opinions and content. I do NOT speak for GE Digital.) I look for ways to do things better and faster.

I am also working on my Masters. I’ve always wanted to get a Masters just couldn’t find the right program. It is going to be a lot of work so I wanted to make sure it covered material I wanted to know more about and could not learn on my own. When I saw this JMU Masters in InfoSec I realized I had finally found the right program. And it has turned out to be more work than I expected, and the blog had to take a back seat. I am one year away from finishing and start my thesis work soon. I hope to blog more over the summer and hopefully a little the next school year.

Why am I writing a blog? I would rather write in 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001. Part of it is I need to get used to writing again both for work and grad school. I also see it as a way to document what I have learned. One of my co-workers is always saying the best way to learn is to teach. I am hoping that applies to blogging as well and by putting it in a blog hopefully it will also help someone else.