GuyCritical was a freelance project I got through Innovalution, Inc. It was already 70% complete. Most of the user-interface was finished. My job was to finish the administration section. It was actually quite an interesting project. Some of the admin stuff was standard stuff I have done before, but there was a few thing that I was able to challenge my creativity. I created a statistic section similar to the feel of Webtrends. That was a satisfying accomplishment.

          This is one of my biggest accomplishments when it comes to ASP that is. I decided to improved my ArcadePod.com website to include many new features. The project took me a dedicated 1.5 months to complete. What made this project such a accomplishment for me is because it was solely done by myself. The graphics, design, data modeling, and programming.

          This is where I mastered ASP programming with database development. I learned how to use SQL Server 7.0, data modeling and working on big projects with other developers. It was definitely a awesome experience.

          I started working there in the middle of August 1999. It was funny because classes started in the beginning of September so I was basically hired for two weeks. I was first put on a project which they thought would take me those two weeks. It was basically to give their lead developer more freedom to work on other projects. The project wasn't even for the Trade.com website, but another inside project. I thought they probably didn't want an newbie to mess with their code.

          The project was just a in-house mailing system where clients can contact their brokers. When they described it to me, it was very basic. They told me to do it whatever I saw fit so being the perfectionist I am, I decide to do an entire online mailing application similar to hotmail. To me, it was a fun project because it was new to me. I was able to finish the project in three days and my manager was very impressed with it. It always feel good when people like your work. =]

          Well, he like the system so much, he asked me to port it to the Trade.com website. Now I was on the same boat as the big boys..haha. There was pretty much only two other developers at the time. Trade.com was a division of BlueStone Capitials and I don't think it was at full force at the time. But they were a few week before their beta launch when I joined.

          After the two or three weeks, I was going to leave and return to school. It would be hectic to work in the city and go to Stony Brook in Suffolk, Long Island. That's a two hour commute. But apparently the manager liked my work so much, he offered me more money to stay. Money is a powerful incentive you know.. haha.. Well, I asked for a 50% increase and he gave it to me! So I worked there until the end of that year when I decide I had to concentrate on my school work.

          I first got into ASP in early 1999 when I was working on my first version of ArcadePod.com. Active Server Pages was pretty simple to pick up because it revolved around Visual Basic so I pretty much didn't have to spend anytime learning it. The one thing that was new to me was the interaction with databases. But once I learn the power of it, I started to see the possibilities and was instantly in love. Back then ArcadePod.com was base on an Access database. The only real dynamic feature of my site back then was the submission of new games. All the other pages were pre-generated by an ASP script I made that read the data from the database and created the pages on the fly. All the pages can be updated through an interface I made for my site. I did this because Access had a limited on concurrent connections, so I didn't want accessing the database on every page to slow down my site.