About

This website is a portfolio. Like virtually all other portfolios, it is a means of advertising the author for employers. But the reasons for its creation are not so straightforward. 

In November, 2008, my last company made me redundant. I wasn't too happy being retrenched, but at least this gave me more time to reskill myself. I'd already been looking at the job ads at SEEK and CareerOne; I observed C# skills were in great demand. Since a friend of mine was MCTS certified (and thus very employable); I thought I'd try for a certificate myself. So I got myself a cheap but legal version of VS2005 off eBay, bought the MCTS training books off Amazon (with errors included), and started studying. I read through the books, started revising, and even looked at putting together a few projects to home my skills.

I found that C# may be a good language for UI programming, but it's bollocks at prototyping. I wanted to express my ideas as easily as possible, but the syntactic sugar and built-in limitations interfered with this. I found it was quicker to trial things in Python. This language may be slower when executing than C#, but it comes with lots of libraries, the only gotcha is the indentation (resolvable with the right sort of editor), and I find it faster to write. 

As for interacting with databases, I prefer a web framework like Django over Microsoft's baroque DataSet and DataTable controls. I can implement pages for data entry in Django's built in admin interface; I need less than a hundred lines of code. It also looks better than the minimal C# equvalent, which uses Microsoft's fugly DataGridView control, (and it still doesn't protect against validation errors).

Since all these ideas were coming out in Python, it would be nice if I could find a place to host Python scripts. Better still, I could use Django to demonstrate scripts by running them. I could also host all the C# projects I plan to write (in order to assist me to gain certification, and also impress future employers). And thus the idea of the website was born. 

The only thing left to do (apart from payment, setup and writing the damn pages) was a name.

A couple of years ago, I lived and worked in Việt Nam. Because it was a new environment, and the social scene was a bit drink heavy, I had a lot of time to myself. So I decided to form a blog. Because VN is a Communist country, and human rights aren't the best, I thought I'd blog anonymously. So I created the blog Down and Out of Sài Gòn, and even posted there and elsewhere under this 'nym. You can look it up if you like. It's moribund. Some time, I'll grab the content and host it here.

I liked the name. So I use it here. It may be cumbersome, but it's part of my life.

Acknowledgments

Ancknowledgments go to "Dr" Jon Swabey, who pointed out the importance of getting the content right first. Props go to Angie Goh, who has given me a lot of information about website building in general, and about the undesirability of garish colouring schemes.

Shout outs go out to my wife - An Trần Murphy. She's the first call for "Does this look ok?" questions, and has given me a lot of assistance with aesthetics.

Thank you all.