I love technology, but I’m not a developer, programmer, or coder. I wanted to be one for quite a while, but never put enough effort into it.

My employer builds a mission critical line of business applications built on the Microsoft .NET platform. We've been using .NET since it was released and have had great success because of this. Although I’m not a developer I have access to the code base for various reasons.

I found my way into a position that was offered to me that I never knew existed (maybe more on that someday) and now I don’t want to do anything else. That reduced my ambitions to become an actual developer, but I do want to learn enough to make my life easier (through automation) and maybe publish a few apps someday.

Watching the ever changing technology roadmap and seeing how our company reacts is exciting, interesting, and fun. But sometimes scary, difficult, and not so fun. But sometimes I see innovation coming from Apple, Google, Microsoft (order by Name asc), and others, I get excited!

So sometimes I do little skunkworks projects on my own time. I’ll take our software and play with it in ways I think could be beneficial for us or our customers. This sometimes lets me nudge our company in a particular direction, while at the same time learning more about these technologies, gaining a better understanding from a business perspective, and what it takes to implement them.

Each of these exercises help me slowly grow my understanding of programming, while at the same time playing with technologies that truly excite me.

To follow are some of my experiences with them while playing with corporate code.