My name is Daniel Longest and I'm a software developer living in Charlottesville, Virginia. I work for a not-for-profit in the financial services industry. Most of my experience is in .NET, particularly back-end services and integration projects, but also web and desktop applications. This blog will cover a variety of areas, but I'm heavily interested in software design. I enjoy training other developers so most entries will focus on demonstrating or discussing areas that are weakly covered or confusing, usually drawn from questions I get asked at work. I train .NET developers at work now and previously was responsible for company-wide SQL training for a wide-ranging audience. That said, I feel like I learn far more from training others than they learn from me: it's definitely a two-way street.

In the most common definition, a champion is the victor of some competition. But who are we competing against? Sure, in some respects we compete on a daily basis (for resources, for promotions, for market share), but those are macro concerns: they say very little about the day to day decisions we all face. The competition that matters is only against one person: yourself.

Every day we have a choice: we can get better or we can get worse. This may seem strange - who would choose to get worse each day? But in the words of the great Brooks Robinson, American baseball player,

Technology advances too fast to believe the skills and knowledge we have today will be sufficient tomorrow. Every day, we need to get better, even if it's just a little. We need to learn something new, try something new, uncover something new. We need to live in the space between the skills we have and their limits: it is only here that we can make progress. This is an uncomfortable place to be, but we must get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

A champion:

• Expects to win, but learns from losses
• Strives to be better every day
• Overcomes adversity, is not overcome by it
• Raises team mates up
• Doesn't make excuses
• Is made, not born

Be A Champion Today

Projects

Most of my experience has been on internal line-of-business applications on the .NET stack, including:

• ASP.NET MVC application for managing candidate exam enrollments, seating, and ticketing
• Windows services and SQL Server Service Broker application to integrate with Kofax scanning platform for grading candidate examinations
• Processing, aggregation, and dissemination of candidate exam results
• Enterprise-wide login application using ASP.NET MVC integrated with the CA cloud platform
• SQL and .NET in-house trainer
• Contributed to open source libraries including AutoFixture and HangFire