Adam's Blog

My wife has given birth to our 3rd child. We have a baby boy, 3.54 kilos (about 7.5 lbs) and 49 cm long. Still deciding on a name, current front runner is Christopher.

My sister who is a photographer by trade has taken some beautiful pictures. She's posted a sample on her blog at http://mariamurray.typepad.com/maria_murray_photography_/2008/10/new-begginings.html

Well nearly. In a recent post Scott Guthrie announced that as of Framework 3.5 Microsoft will make available the full source code for the .NET assemblies. This will enable integrated debugging of the base classes through Visual Studio 2008.

See the full article here http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

Cool.

Finally, I've managed to get round to setting up my Blog.

This is the first of hopefully many informative and interesting :-) posts.

I wanted to kick things off with a little background about me. (yes, very interesting, I know, I'll try to keep it brief, I promise)

I'll be 28 in 1 month. Time has flown by and I can't really say I've noticed. Ever since my final year of university I've been going full steam ahead and not really had time to look back. I am married to Barbara my lovely wife whom I love to annoy by calling her Barbie. We have 2 beautiful children; Anette who's 6 in November and Daniel who just turned 1 in September.

I met Barbara in 2000 while on my annual summer trip to my native Poland. We fell in love and by shortly after Christmas Barbara arrived in the UK (mid way through my final year at uni). We started planning our wedding. By the end of February Barbara was with child and we were married at the end of April.

I spent most of my time revising and finishing my final year project and exams were just round the corner. I'm proud to say that even with the obvious distractions I still managed to achieve a 1st Class Bachelor of Science with Honours (BSc Hons.) in Computer Science and Mathematics. I still consider that one of my greatest intellectual achievements.

Shortly after completing university we went away for a 6 week honeymoon in the south of Poland in the Tatry Mountains. Barbara, who by now was 5 months pregnant, was not showing any sings of slowing down while hiking the mountain trails.

Following our return I looked to get a job and landed a position at BuildOnline - a company that developed and hosted a B2B online collaboration application written in Java. We started looking for a flat. On the 9th of November our little girl Anette was born.

By the end of November we were very close to completing the purchase of our new flat when a sudden crisis nearly made it all fall through. BuildOnline were funded by external investors so when the money ran out they had to cut back 30% of their workforce and I was made redundant. Last in, first out. Right in between exchange of contracts and completion, thanks a lot!!

Luckily, my line manager who had unenviable task of informing me of this had some contacts and promised to circulate my CV. This got me an interview with IMGroup and within 2 weeks I had a job once again and the rest as they say is history.

2001 was a very busy year for me:

• Got married
• Finished Uni with a 1st Class Degree
• Bought a property
• Had a child
• Got 2 jobs

I got all that out the way and settled in to IMGroup concentrating on personal development to further my career.

It was quite a shift going from the beautifully object oriented world of Java and JSP to the Microsoft world of VB6 and ASP. Frankly I was not impressed and decided to concentrate on HTML and JavaScript front end development. After 6 months I moved over to middle tier development and VB6 became second nature. I needed to know in order to pursue Microsoft Certification.

Within a year I was an MCSD and the career development was well underway.

Fast forward 5 years and I'm still working for IMGroup. I am now a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant and loving every minute of it. The company is extremely well managed and has a very high profile within Microsoft. We've managed to win the BI partner award for innovation for 3 years running. Not bad for a team of less than 40 people.