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| Michael Irwin Profile Page |
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| Email |
Send Email |
| Hits |
866 |
| Online Status |
OFFLINE |
| Member Since |
02/21/2005 00:00:00 |
| Last Online |
04/14/2010 12:35:26 |
| Last Updated |
06/06/2007 13:37:54 |
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| URL: |
www.tekstlogik.com |
| Bio: |
Mike Irwin; Programmer, Tech Author, Paradox® CTech. I started programming at school, in FORTRAN, when someone taught us the language and then gave us ball-point pens and pre-perforated punch-cards to use to create our card decks. Turn-around time was about 7 days, so you had plenty of time to be creative ! A university degree in Electronics (well, mainly Computer Science courses, really !) followed, and then I emerged into the big wide world with two job offers in hand, no less ! Those who know me will be surprised that I turned down the chance of working as a programmer in the Bass brewery in Burton-on-Trent, but those who know me better will understand the greater lure of a UK systems house. Several months programming a hotel system were followed by several years working for the Royal Navy, programming ship design CADD in FORTRAN. 18 months at ESOC in Darmstadt (satellite software) followed, and then about 9 more in Portsmouth, designing spacecraft antennas. I continued moving from project to project, now as a freelancer, for a few more years, working with Norsk Data in Norway, on oncology imaging with Philips in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and then moving back to Germany to join a German software house in Frankfurt. There I worked on message switching systems, met process control systems, encountered Ventura Publisher, and started with databases with Ingres and rDb.
The end of the eighties found me in France writing technical documentation on Smart Cards and in Switzerland writing about clinical trials systems; however, all good things have to come to an end, so I returned, finally, to England for a few months, got a copy of Paradox 3.5 from Borland, and set off for a training course at Dunstan Thomas. There I met some friends from Eindhoven, and joined them in their software house. 1992 was fun; Paradox for Windows beta copies came every month and, once it was released in 1993, we started to get work in it. I also started showing quite a presence on the CIS PdoxWin forum, resulting in being invited to join Borland's TeamB - the ultimate honour at the time for a Paradox programmer. During the later part of the summer I developed an application for a home improvement company in The Netherlands: this project was both large and time-constrained. At this time I also started developing a suite of libraries and forms (the Application Skeleton) that I use to this day as a basis for all new Paradox projects. October 1993 saw me move to New Jersey at the request of a Paradox development company here in the USA, with whom I worked with Paradox for Windows on a variety of projects until 1996. During early 1994 we developed the RPN prefixing notation for ObjectPAL that can be observed on the ParadoxCommunity.com T-shirt as a way of smoothing the interaction of programmers working on the same project. It seems to have been successful !
In 1996 I joined Bluestone Software to manage all their technical documentation, continuing to work with Paradox customers from home and was invited to join Corel's CTech when Corel took over Paradox. In 2000 I joined PREIT, a real estate management company in Philadelphia, and stayed there for four years, working with Paradox and J.D. Edwards, and continuing to take support and development work in Paradox, documentation in Ventura Publisher, and some web site development in my own time. In 1994 I left PREIT and spent a year developing web sites in PHP for WebMD before joining Keane, Inc., to spend almost two years supporting software at a large nuclear power station in New Jersey.
In 2007 I completed my "tour" at the power station and have joined a small start-up company specialising in producing software for schools to use to cope with the legal requirements of their interactions with their less-gifted pupils and the pupils' parents. This work involves Paradox, Access, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, and ASP.NET !
Right now my life is in a serious state of flux, but occasionally I get to sleep, but it doesn't seem like very often ! My poor beloved Subaru went to a Better Place (at least, I hope it did) in January 2005, courtesy of a side-impact that left me strap-hanging and upside-down ! Not in a ditch, happily, so exiting was fairly easy, but it sustained too much damage to economically repair. It ran ok, though, and had no loss of "headroom" !"
You can reach me most easily through the Feedback form on my web site, http://www.tekstlogik.com, which also has the Application Skeleton, the FAQs, and lots of other Paradox information. Email me at that domain too - paradox@tekstlogik.com
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