My new blog

My name is Ken Brill.  I live in central Missouri about 100 miles south of St. Louis. My wife and I run a small 30-acre hobby farm here in Missouri, and I work as a developer from a small, dark corner in my basement.  Out here we only have satellite Internet (Viasat) so that's fun.  They advertise 25Mbs but I rarely see anything better than 12Mbs.  It does the job but I miss my cable modem sometimes.

On the farm, we raise about a dozen goats and sheep, 2 cows, 3 horses, 7 dogs (ranging from a Chihuahua and Maltese to a pair of Great Pyrenees, 6 cats of no discernible use, 4 kids (all girls), and a few dozen Chickens, Guinea fowl, Peacocks, Turkeys, and Ducks.  We have been at it for 5 years now so we are still learning but it's a lot of fun when it's not freezing outside.

The last 12 years I have specialized in SugarCRM.  I began with version 2.5 when a small company I worked for started using it and I have been working on SugarCRM ever since.  I had my own consulting company for a few years where I sold a product called 'Sugar Fully Loaded' that was essentially the SugarCRM CE product with several popular add-ons already loaded and merged (no such thing as upgrade-safe back then).  I spent 9 years after that working at SugarCRM in different roles and now I work remotely as a senior developer on an enterprise level installation and we are getting ready to roll out version 7.10 next year.

This blog was started January 1st, 2018 and will be 95% SugarCRM, PHP, SQL, JavaScript and Linux stuff.  The other 5% will be personal stuff of little importance about running my farm or working remotely or other such nonsense.  I don't know Google Blogger very well yet, so I expect it will be a mess for a while.  The projects I post here will mostly be things I could not find anywhere else, were not well documented somewhere else or were difficult to find.  I find things almost every week in the developers guide that could be better or no longer work the way they say it does.  I hope to fill in those gaps too.

I got my first computer, a Commodore Vic20, in the early 80's.  The first thing I wrote was a simple word processor that took longer to load from tape once than all the time I spent using it.  Next was a D&D game that was actually 5 separate games all under 5K each that loaded one after the other.  Then I got the 16K memory expansion card and thought to myself "who would ever use this much memory?".    The last thing I remember writing was a side scroller space game where my brother and I used random 8bit x 8bit chunks of memory to render asteroids.  It saved memory (as we were close to using up that massive expansion card by then) and it gave us convincingly craggy asteroids.   aahh the glorious days of PEEKs and POKEs.

From there I spent a few years working at Commodore and running an Amiga BBS system in Philadelphia and later in St. Lous.  I had two 100M hard drives initially and that made me the biggest amateur BBS on the east coast for a short time.  I had three 1200 baud modems, no waiting, more or less.   I even wrote a simple, compiled programming languge called 'E', for on-line gaming or at least what passed for on-line gaming back then.  It was based loosly on C and REXX, calling it D sounded stupid so it was E.  A few months later someone else wrote A-REXX for Amiga and my language was instantly a dinosaur.

I spent the 90's on AS/400s and various versions of Windows, learning and then forgetting many, many programming languages.   After that I got out of programming full time and worked at a cool company that made and repaired mobile advertising vehicles, like the Wienermobile, Earhtlink Radio City Music Hall tour, Ali G Limo Tour and the NBA Jam van.  I did everything from show controllers (another programming language) to sound systems to kiosk software and websites.  It was also my first experience with SugarCRM.

Now, I develop mainly on a Mac with PHPStorm.  Been using that for maybe 9 years so there will be a blog post or two on that setup.   I also use XDebug, XHProf and the JavaScript debuggers in FireFox and Safari every day so there are a few posts in there I am sure.  I have more than a decade of experience debugging PHP and JavaScript so I would love to field any questions.

If you have any ideas for posts you would like to see or questions about any topic you find here just ask.  I love doing research and if there is an answer I will try to find it.  If you need help implementing anything you find here let me know, I work cheap, maybe free if it's small enough.

Lastly, while all my code discussed here is licensed under the MIT license, the text of my blog is not.  If you want to repost anything you see here you have to ask first.  Just email me at ken.brill@gmail.com and explain what you want to do.  I don't mind sharing but I do want to control my work and get credit for it.