About Me

I'm not 100% sure how to start off. Let's give it a shot.

My name is Bob Walker, and I do love Software Development.

My passion for software development was discovered in grade school, right around 6th grade. A game called Turtle Tag written using the Logo programming language on an Apple IIe was my introduction to how fun programming could be.

Like most kids, I started to grow up. By 15 I had developed the typical teenager attitude. I didn't have time for geeky stuff like programming.

Try as I might those interests kept creeping back in. When I turned 17, I used my birthday money to max out the RAM in my Mac. I got it up to 10 MB. Yeah boyeeeeee! I learned how to fix computers for my parent's office, so they didn't have to buy their intern's new ones.

College was where my passions started to be reignited. I chose my college, Utah State University because I could major in Forestry there. My dream was to be a park ranger for the national forest service. That dream was soon crushed when I learned biology, and my brain does not get along. I had no problem learning C#, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, CSS, XML, and VB. Biology is my Achilles heel. That was a real problem since forestry is all about biology. One of my friends suggested I try software development. In high school, I would have heard from my other friends about what a geek I was, and how they couldn't believe I was their friend. In college, my friends kept telling me I was going to make some serious cash money.

I got my first real job as a programmer at a publishing company called Sandhills Publishing. I was excited to get a job there because I loved reading CPU magazine. There I cut my teeth on ASP. Soon we were converting sites over to use ASP.NET, and I got to learn about N-Tier programming.

My next job was as West Corporation. I moved up to be a software engineer. The engineer part made it sound extra fancy. While working there, I learned about SOA based architecture and did many a deep dive into SQL Server. My team was responsible for ensuring all the nightly jobs, and back-end processing was working. Being responsible for 500+ jobs drove home the importance of writing quality code.

After West Corporation came to TelventDTN, which during my time there was bought Schneider Electric. After working in two VB.NET shops, I finally had a chance to program in C# AND use Oracle for the database. The architect there pushed me to be a better developer. He taught me about SOLID programming, proper unit testing, proper integration testing, and overall writing good code.

I used that knowledge to land my next job, Lead Application Developer at Farm Credit Services of America. Every lesson I learned at my previous jobs has been put to good use. And I have had the chance to learn even more. Not just about popular web frameworks, like Backbone and Angular, but also about being a good leader.

For about 14 months I worked at Elections Systems and Software as the Principal Software Architect. My time there was brief for a number of reasons, namely I was found my dream job at Octopus Deploy as a Solution Architect. My primary day to day responsibility was to help people be successful in using Octopus Deploy, be it finding a process to help solve a CI/CD problem, or how to configure Octopus Deploy correctly. After doing that for a bit, I was promoted to be the leader of the Customer Success team.

This site is my place on the web where I can write about the lessons I have learned as well as show off some of the new code I have been working on in my free time.

Thank you for reading.