So my one and only New Year's resolution is to blog about something worthwhile (i.e., .NET related stuff) at least once a week.  So it begins.

 For anybody who cares, here's a short bio.

My name is William Sullivan.  I'm a developer in Columbia, SC, working with a small ISV called AIG Technology.  I've worked with AIG Technology for coming on four years now. 

Software development is a second career for me.  I went back to school to earn my bachelor's in Computer Science at USC (the REAL USC, not that rinky dink one out in California) back in 2000. 

Since graduation, I've been primarily a .NET developer and solidly in the C# camp.  Since I'm working for a small software development company, I've had to wear many hats.  That's cliché-speak for "I have to do everything myself."  While I work in C#, I've had to do some stuff in C++, classic VB, and tons of SQl (you can see my CodingHorror sticker on my monitor here, with an 11 page sql query* on the screen).  Doing everything yourself also means learning and using all the tools of the trade, from setting up websites on Server 2003 to debugging on client sites with Profiler and Process Monitor.  Its one of the problems with, and at the same time one of the benefits of, working for a small development shop.  I know that I've definitely learned way more in three years here than I did in four at USC, and would have learned in ten years at a large development firm.

The name of the blog comes from the State Street Pub in West Columbia, where I and some of my friends from work like to hang out and relax after the day is done.  State Street Gang is a name under which I and one of my co-bloggers and best friends, Ricky Johnson, came up with as a name under which we can develop side projects.  Ricky comes from the world of Cobol and VB 6, so be kind to him.  He is currently making a transition to the world of .NET, so I'm hoping he will add some blog entries from that perspective.  As for our side projects, we haven't gotten much work done as our office-away-from-the-office is a bar.  We do have some projects in various states of completion, which will no doubt show up here every once in awhile.

Personally, I have a few projects out in the wild from before SSG, including a lightweight image viewer (the code base is very rough, so be kind).  I'm also a member of the DotNetKicks development group, with a few lines of code in the current build.  You can see my DNK website here.  Other projects that don't have any releases yet include a betting pool managing website (that's a SSG project) and an online survey host that I'm developing for my girlfriend's masters thesis.  No pressure there.

So that's me in a few paragraphs.  I'm hoping to keep this blog interesting with some good quality content posted on a regular basis.  That's one resolution I think I can stick to.

* How can I possibly create an 11 page sql query and not suck, you might ask yourself.  In my defense, the query is actually multiple optimized queries encapsulating security logic and returning multiple datasets in an effort to reduce server traffic for a web frontend to a legacy system.