I recently started a new position with Caracole (a furniture company) as an IT Programmer.  Now that title may not sound like much, but it is much more then what it sounds like.  It is a relatively small company backed by a much larger company in China.  Here at Caracole, we design the furniture, market the furniture, (other facilities outside the US manufacture the furniture), we include support, logistics, sales (50% International) accounting and IT.  There is currently a small team of 3 for IT; a network and pc tech guy (Network Administrator), IBM Mainframe guy with some desktop and web application development (and IT Manager), and lead software engineer guy (IT Programmer).

I am reviewing all their applications (web, web service and desktop) and moving into TFS Online version control, some using GIT.  This software includes desktop applications, web sites (webforms and MVC and Web API).  I have begun upgrading and enhancing and at points completely re-designing and developing these applications the latest .Net with C#.  There is also a mobile app for iOS that runs on an iPad that is more or less a wrapper for a web browser and one of our web sites.

A recent new project I designed and developed a solution to process a showroom guests expo badge to get guest information and register the guest into our sales application.  I built a web page (MVC application) with a text box that would work with a bar-code scanner and receive the bar-code number from the bar-code scanner (scanning a guests expo tag on their lanyard) and submit the form.  On the server I posted the bar-code to a new Web API.  This WebAPI would then interface with a 3rd party vendor to retrieve the guests registered information (name, company, contact info, etc).  To do this I instantiated an HTTP client, hit a web page passing along the bar-code and authentication details, and it would return a JSON string including the guests registered information.  I then saved this information and other data to the database and returned a status code and error message back to the calling web page.  Besides a few bad data issues and credential problems with the 3rd party, it all worked quite well and was a big success.

I’m excited about future opportunities to design and build new solutions and look forward to bringing on another developer / help-desk person to lead and help us provide even more features and functionality to our applications.