Sometimes I need to be a "nerd".    This is one of those times.

When I came to AIA, my programming knowledge was very small, so it was only natural for me to set aside what I already knew and pick up and learn C# which my boss was using.    I got the basics down, and have been able to pick up new items fairly quickly along the way.     I've sort of made the challenge to myself that as I grow in my skills, I would try to bite off one or two new pieces of what .NET has to offer at a time, and not too much.    It's worked out pretty well for me.

However, my latest find has been one of the most exciting.   

Subsonic is an open-source tool that builds objects and classes off of your database, to give you the ability to do true object-oriented programming in code.   (I realize that this last sentence makes no since to most of my readers!)    In layman's terms, with Subsonic I am able to talk to my database in the same manner I talk to other pieces of code.    Maybe this visual will help:

Here's my original code -

Here's my code with Subsonic -

Look at the difference... it's like 7 lines shorter.     Subsonic makes my job as a developer so much quicker and more efficient!   It's unreal what options I now have available to myself.   And in the end, I become a better programmer through seeing how it does it's stuff as well.

And best of all, this is just one small piece of what this tool offers.   There's a whole bunch of utilities I have not even touched yet.  

So what does it all mean.   It means I can begin to get more done,  in less amount of time, and hopefully accomplish a handful of my goals in 2009 as a result.  I am sure in the coming months, you'll here me reference this tool more.

Over the course of the past 18 months work for me has been more divided than ever for me between help desk for end-users  and web design.   I can truly call myself a "coder", because more than often I spend a majority of my week writing code for some project or another.

In September I pushed live two sites:

The first was a Sportlinc website, for the recently revamped AIA Sportlinc ministry.  SportLinc is designed to help resource student-leaders to lead AIA on campus where we do not have staff there to lead, mainly DII & DIII schools.   Chelsey actually is helping administratively to get this movement off the ground.   The website is resource-centered for students to be able to come and get resources to help lead team meetings, discipleship, weekly AIA meetings and more.

I am still not completely satisfied with all of the design, but am awaiting a new SportLinc logo to be created see what direction that make take the site.  My favorite piece however is the Campus Locator, where I integrated all of the campuses with Google Maps.   We were also able to copy that tool to AIA.com as well.

The second site is our Application Center.   As we begin to connect with more and more students we needed a more robust site be able to handle the multiple application needs as well as various forms.   This site has had over 50+ applications go through in three weeks for next summer already,  and will see somewhere between 1500 - 2000 total between Sept. - May.    I actually built the back-end for this site (what the staff use to process the applications) last summer.

I also want to share, not necessarily being the product of my work the new AIA.com.  It went live just over two weeks ago, and still has some tweaking to do, but definitely makes for an exciting September for our IT department.

I posted a page with brief descriptions of all my work here.