Nate Taylor

“Nate, we won’t be having your code review this morning.” “Oh.  Is someone out?” “No, there’s a problem with your code” With that, Roger handed me a few sheets of paper that had a lot of red ink all over them.  I had been out of college about 14 or 15 months, and had joined ...

“Won’t you be bored?” asked Kevin. He couldn’t believe that I’d be leaving a team of 15-20 engineers developing software for Caterpillar’s equipment to writing a quoting application of a manufacturer in Omaha.  Not only that, but I’d basically be by myself.  The only one working on the app, and one of 3 developers (the ...

We expect a lot when we interview people for open developer positions.  We want to find someone who is interested in coding, constantly learning and reasonably up-to-date on technology.  However, we also know that interviews are a stressful experience, and developers aren’t always the most sociable people.  As a result we try to ease into our ...

As I was walking down the hall, I heard “Hey Nate!  Come in here!” I walk into my coworkers office and he asks “Do you  have any idea how to open a FoxPro database?” “Did you look for a FoxPro viewer online?” “Yeah, I can’t find one.  Any idea how we could crack it?” “What ...

“Hey, do you think you could add some sort of revision-history for these files?  HR is saying that the two assistants are constantly overwriting each other’s changes, because they aren’t sure if they have the latest version or not.” “Yeah, I could probably do that.  I’d have to update the document class to link it ...

I sat there dumbfounded.  I was absolutely sure that my friend was pulling my leg and would soon start laughing.  I waited.  No laugh, heck, not even a smirk.  Instead a wave of disbelief and disappointment crossed his face. My friend was working on the new version of some internal website.  As we met for ...

Years ago, my attention was drawn to this car forum discussion about someone who had hooked up a garden hose to flush out the crankcase of his Ford Mustang. If you don’t want to read it, supposedly this guy bought a Mustang and was doing an oil change.  He thought it was too dark and ...

In the fall of 1996, I was sitting in my first classes at the University of Missouri – Rolla.  I was there to get a degree in Electrical Engineering, and was taking a few basic engineering classes.  One was an engineering design class.  The class walked us through a few basic engineering software packages, like ...

Over the past few months, I’ve been having an on-going conversation with a coworker about what makes someone a good software engineer.  What actually prompted the conversation was the mix of backgrounds that other members of our team have. We have developers with computer science degrees, electrical engineering degrees, no degrees, and probably a few ...

Lately I’ve been working with OpenRasta to create some RESTful services for .NET.  I absolutely love it.  It has built in DependencyInjection, but also allows you to wire up Castle or Ninject if you’d prefer.  The one thing I didn’t like about it was there was no NuGet package.  Additionally, each time I created a ...