Silverterra 3d blog

first steps (commodore – basic, assembly, micro controllers) – never mentioned period

When I was young there was no PC. The computer was only a dream for me. My first computer experience was a programmer course when I was 12 (that was the commodore time). Was awesome. Some years later while I learned many secrets about electrical circuits I’ve developed applications on paper and did some small adventures in the world of commodore assembly. Later arrived 5 pc-like computer to the school. Was strange and absolutely undocumented. I’ve tried to understand that and I went back to the roots. At that time I discovered the micro controllers (starting at 8048, 8051, 8052, 8080, is anybody knows what SID chip is?), but that was not enough for me (that was not enough visual).

pc stone ages (DBase, Clipper, Visual Basic, Assembly) – 4 years

Later in the college my hobby was the PC and the programming. DBase, Clipper, Visual Basic mostly and some assembly.

outlook (map drawing, CoreDraw macro programming) – 2 years

After my schools I have started to work as a map drawer. Some months later I bought my first computer. I remember I bought that computer and one of my colleges bought a small flat. The cost was the same. He was the smarter may be, but both of us were very satisfied with the result.
At that time my job was closer to designing that developing. I made maps. City maps mostly. 10-12 hours per day. Every day, saturday, sunday. There were many applications to create maps, but the best was a designer software, the CorelDraw (5, 6, 7, 8, 9) and of course PhotoShop (5, 6, cs5). We made better maps, than the professionals.
Some month army crashed my small company and all of my mood as well to start again to draw maps. There was the chance to go back to my old dream (yes, programming).

this is my real way (Visual Basic, C#, Oracle and other databases) – 4 years

My first software developer position was funny. Visual Basic and Oracle in 24 hour, it was 2001. The Oracle was my first experience in the real database world and remained my favorite until now. (I’ve remember years later in a huge company in a huge database when I had an idea to solve a problem using a partitioned table I’ve found an issue in the oracle database engine. I explained that to the teacher on a some days course, who tried to prove the issue is only in my mind and that is not exist. I produced that and the teacher’s face became white – I will show this issue in my blog later – may be not).
So some years in company support with VB, later vb.net, c# and Oracle was great.

doing in big (DatawareHouse – Oracle, Business Objects Reporting and Data Integrator) – 5 years

I was lucky when I’ve got a position as a datawarehouse developer (data pumping and data processing with stored procedures mostly). Database from morning to afternoon. To build processes and make proper reports was a great challenge, but later I’ve found a more interesting task. That was the database optimizing.
Every huge database has a special property. Everything is perfect at the production go live and everything become wrong after a while. When the etl processes pumps millions of records every day to the database that will be to fat for the first idea. May be 1 year may be only some months. Be sure it will be crashed. I solved many situations where the process or reporting crashed because of the followings. Missing or wrong indexes, wrong or missing hints, unnecessary data, none logical processes, simple inattention.
There is a special feeling when a complicated select from 10+ tables (with 20+ joins) with million of records affected with more than 3 hours running time and you can reduce it to less then 20 seconds… Have to say to predict the behavior of processes with huge data is a hard question.

Beside of this I’ve kept a parallel line from my early developer life. This line contains many challenges around Oracle, C#, web developing.
These two lines the datawarehouse and the freelance developing were a perfect combination for me. I’ve solved many issues, problems, seemingly unsolvable situations. Sometimes mr. google was puzzled when I cried a question to the web. And that point was the best, when I had to find myself the solution. Despite all this, I could’t to avoid to fall in love with web developing.

thinking parallely (c#, Oracle, aspx, php, javascript, jquery, mssql, mysql, photoshop, svn) – 12 years

Here starting my best time. Like life in two parallel universe. The first one is to think hardly the second one is to find new challenges and claim every mountain like an exciting game.

Like this problem
oracle, vb.net, c# and a company support question.
I have days grouped by weeks, months, years. Over this I have two type of orders per day and ordered lines and transports and… so this is too much. I had to visualize this huge information heap on a window.
Was 2 or 3 weeks thinking when I realised I need a new control to do this.
Was a great challenge to figure out the background structure, the data structure in the control, how can I convert the simple data into a good structure to visualize that. The result was this:

This is a fully customizable visualizer control. To show block and tables in a view (like a web page…, but this is an independent reusable control). This is the base, but the items have a drag & drop capability as well.
The code of this control is more complicated and contains much more time (was built from zero) than the software itself where I used that!

or like this
Oracle 8.1.6 (unable to update because of webdb) and you have a complicated c# application which can collect data from the internet. The collecting time is typically 1-2 seconds. How you can manage the external application from the oracle promptly?
I did it with TCP link. The c# application received a small interface (like a specialized web server) and the oracle database was the client in this relation.

or like this
We have a data source with many XML files. We need to load the XML data into a database (oracle) with a daily process. We need some data cleaning and processing to create some proper report from the data.
We can use ftp protocol to transfer the files or luckily the source server has an iis as well…
We can use etl tools or we can use only the oracle…
The solution written broadly in this post: load xml file into table with validation/correction

now

I’ve started to collect my tricks, adventures in a place – you are here now.
I will record everything what I think that is noticeable from the present and from the past.
First of all this is a knowledge base for me, but not only for me. May be other developers will find some valuable pieces among the posts.

Have a good digging!

present (c, c++, touchgfx – electronics, micro controllers – kiCad, freeCad)

Beside of programming the electronics was my second biggest favorite – mostly as a hobby. I’ve got a chance to do it again. Programming and electronics together. What else can I wish?
In the future I will touch this theme too.