Good Evening and Welcome to my first posting on my own blog. While KC writes and talks about many of the day-to-day operations and the technical aspects of our business, I hope to cover some of the business, economic, and political ramifications of a small Independent Software Vendor (ISV).

And what better to start with than the latest and great issue of Welcome to the Carnival of the Capitalists!

In the meantime, we have filed to be an official business within the state and have received our license to charge salestax. Fortunately, since most of our business is over the Internet and for various remote clients, this should be a minor inconvenience. In the meantime, I am required to file monthly reporting of income in order to access the amount of tax to pay. I've already filled it out once to review the information required and it appears to only take a few minutes a month... except when a check is due.

Have a good evening.

For those of you who may not be aware, CaseySoftware is still in the fledgling startup phase. We have few customers and no one is drawing a salary in order to preserve capital. Therefore, everyone working for CaseySoftware also holds down a regular fulltime job. Sometimes this works out quite well, but other times it makes things quite difficult. For example...

For my fulltime job, I am on the road at the moment. I was picked up by my boss at 5am and we hopped a plane to our 2nd largest office in the US. Upon landing and driving to the office, we spent nearly an hour trying to negotiate a connection to our intranet. It worked... somewhat.

After discovering bad cat5, a bad hub, and a bad dsl connection, we installed the VPN client and went to work. Unfortunately, the connection was a bit too unstable for SourceSafe. We can open a project, browse, and see that things are checked out, but we can't check things out ourselves. Therefore, in order to continue development, I have created a repository using my local Subversion install and have gone from there. Eventually, I will have to re-sync the files with the SourceSafe install, but I'll ignore that elephant for now.

In the meantime, I have found a pocket of non-geeks who use Mozilla/Firefox. I guess there is hope. Now we just need to make all of the apps standards compliant...

In my current job, I worked extensively with clients both internal and external to our group. It started as an interesting job, but steadily got more and more difficult as time went on due to the multiplicative tendency of our applications.

We would initially build an application for one client. After the bulk of the development was complete, a demo of the beta application would happen for another client. They would love the new system but of course would need some "small tweaks".

We would deploy the initial version for them and begin on the "small tweaks"... which always worked out to be much larger than expected. This was stressful, but understandable and expected. The end result of this was to now have TWO versions of a similar-but-not-quite-the-same codebase both of which had to be supported. As time went on, development continued, and critical bugs were found, production and development would have to be maintained separately. What now started as one version has blossomed into four. Then another demo would occur. Sometimes this would be to a new client (and create versions five and six) and sometimes it would be of one of the "small tweaks" to one of the existing clients.

I started geeking around with the settings of Drupal here and have configured it as my primary RSS reader and adding a few other modules. It's really pretty nifty.

To expand on my initial posting, as the Sr/Lead Developer of the company, I have my hands in every project that comes in the door. For some I participate in the determining the vision and goals of the project, for others I design much of the architecture of the system, still for others I get my hands deep into nearly every line of code used, and finally, I'm starting to look into the business development side of projects. It's a sort of Jack of All Trades role and I quite enjoy it.

Within our current dotProject modifications, I am working to integrate it with the Mantis Bug Tracking System. We have used both systems extensively for quite a while and it's a logical progression. At this time, I have all of the read-only functionality complete. My next step is to create, modify, and delete issues.

This time I'm really leaving.

~ KC

Well, somehow you've come across this site, so welcome and make yourself comfortable and have a look around.

This blog is being set up by me at the request of our CEO. With the recent growth, quality, and interest shown in the blog-world - or blogosphere, if you prefer - he thought this would be a good experiment at transparency within our organization and to our customers. As a result of this, he and I will be posting to this site on a regular basis and may include others as this progresses.

With all of that being said, I should introduce myself. I am KC, the Lead/Senior Developer of CaseySoftware.com I work extensively within the dotProject Project Management System and we are building customizations and improvements to make it a solid commercial offering. I have an extensive experience in software development spanning nearly eight years and about as many languages.

That's about all I have for now. I'm calling it quits for the day and hope you come check out the site again soon.

~ KC