Griff-ITH, yeah, just like Andy...

   Well, it has been a wonderful summer. After looking at what lies ahead and the work that needs to be done, I had decided to take a well deserved summer off. Two years of full-time school and work left a lot of work around the house that needed to be done. Let's not forget rest, lot of rest! It was also a good time to stand back and assess what I had done during school and what I would like to do next.

   One of the first things to make my list was an update to the website here from a web-forms site to a MVC site. So in my free time I have been studying ASP.Net MVC. I ran through the old Music Store Tutorial on asp.net, as well as several other tutorials, and am now currently reading through Professional ASP.net MVC 5 published by Wrox, and is such an excellent book. After that a look into Windows 10 apps has caught my interest after taking the time to run through the simple "hello world" app tutorial. The cross-platform nature of Windows 10 peaks my curiosity.

   Now that I have costumes done for the kids, stay tuned for the new website to come. Additionally I would like to create a mock inventory or employee program, and refactor the e-store that was done for my e-commerce class which was a lot of fun. Learning the tools of MVC will make the construction of these so nice and I am exited to build them!

Then it all comes to an end. Yes, the last two years of schooling are almost done. Well, at least the formal schooling for the Programmer/Analyst AAS from the Milwaukee Area Technical College. Really, it had been changed to Mobile Application Developer and that is what is printed on my piece of paper, but many of us found it more accurate by the old title since we covered so much more than just mobile. Now as I finish up the last of my projects, I kind of have a Bloat moment. No, I am not bloated, nor feel that way. I refer to Bloat, the puffer fish at the end of the movie Finding Nemo that my kids enjoy so much. After escaping the fish tank to the ocean and floating on the water, stuck in a plastic baggie, he asks, "Now what?" Yeah, now what? Yes, yes the job hunt we all know that. The pleading with places, "I know I am a noob with no experience, but please, PLEASE, give me a chance!" It goes without saying. But what else? We learned quite a bit, but really only skimmed the surface. Fellow student Rahul put it nicely when he called it "programming tapas." A little taste of everything. Java, Android, C++, C#, ASP.NET, iOS, SQL, DB design, SDLC and methodologies, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/JQuery are among the flavors that were offered up. Well, that can leave you with a basic foundation in each, but let's be honest, you could really take each of those and almost make a two-year study each just to master it. It is that Bloat moment where you realize you are only floating on the surface and it goes so much deeper.