About
I’ve been an independent software designer / developer for the past 38 years. In this business, that makes me an ROF (Really Old Fart). In the past I’ve done everything from Z-80 assembler to Visual FoxPro to classic ASP.
In the early 90’s I wrote two books on FoxPro, and was technical editor at FoxTalk magazine (now FoxRockX) for a couple of years. But currently, I mostly concentrate on the .NET platform, architecting and building line-of-business applications, usually involving large databases. Back-end work is my particular specialty. I’ve had the honor to contribute especially to the commercial credit space over much of the past 24 years, but have career experience in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, distribution, transportation and mortgage servicing.
I’ve been exposed to a lot in my career, but I’m most immediately familiar with C# and Sql Server via both ADO.NET and Entity Framework (both pre and post-.NET Core). I’ve also worked with PostgreSQL, MySQL and a smattering of Python and PHP. Although I’ve been mostly a back end developer, I’ve slung JavaScript / TypeScript / CSS and had exposure to technologies like jQuery, knockout.js, and ASP.NET MVC. I’ve done true CI and I’ve done Scrum and TDD, and built an integration test framework — although I long ago cut my teeth on the likes of Steve McConnell and the timeless Gerald Weinberg and consider those my real professional touchstones (e.g., “step through every line of code you write with the debugger to make sure it’s doing what you think it is!” and “all software problems are ultimately people problems”).
I am currently exploring Blazor with great interest, and getting the lay of functional programming with both F# and Elixir. So, I am a greybeard, yet still curious and in love with my craft.
Here you’ll find my musings about software development — both the process and the business thereof. To my clients who might visit, have no fear; I limit myself to non-proprietary matters and change names and details to protect the innocent.
I live just off the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, USA, and through the magic of technology, work for clients all over the country. You’ll find my CV at www.linkedin.com/in/bobgrommes.
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I ran into your blog when reading a great article by Sarah Mei that explained in great detail the reasons MongoDB is a bad idea for a data store. The detail is required by those youngsters who never ran into anything but SQL. Those of us old enough to remember the pre-SQL standard Hierarchical databases and having to repeat 3rd normal form 3000 times in the Compuserve forums easily understand the problem of document database data duplication and fixed relation modeling. Of course we are also not nervous about properly modeled and indexed 7 table joins as well because we had to understand set theory while the new folks had that abstracted away by frameworks. Thanks for the blog, it is support for the case that us old folks actually have valuable insight that the youth can not take away even as they ignore it.
I am trying to remember if I ran into you on the old Compuserve Foxpro forums? I’ve been away from direct programming for a number of years while I ran projects that other programmers actually coded. I’m getting caught up now in a time when there are so many choices for languages.
@Bill Pennock, you may well have run into me on the CompuServe FoxPro forums, I was certainly there. Not that my memory of those salad days is terribly clear anymore. Thanks for the kind remarks. I am not very actively posting because so much of what I am working on is proprietary and the interesting bits are things I can’t comment on, but I hope to come up with some posts in the coming months. Stay tuned.