About

I suppose the simplest place to start is my name, which happens to be Todd Herman.  I think I was around 10 years old when my father graced me with my first computer.  The glorious (and now on display at the National Museum of American History) Commodore 64.  The sight of it flipped my nerd switch into the on position and I don’t believe it has ever been turned off since then.  The first thing I did was grab as many BASIC programming books I could find and began to dive into a brand new world.

The years went by and I knew programming and computers would always be one of my primary passions.  We just seemed to understand one another.  I moved through school into college and held numerous mundane jobs which finally lead me to the beginning of my career.  That was over 10 years ago and I have been programming ever since.

My programming path went the way of basic.  I don’t know how exactly it happened.  I never really thought about it until recently.  I started with several of the early versions (maybe 4?) of Visual Basic and then progressed into versions 5 and 6.  This lead into VB .NET and I have stuck with that up until this current job from version 1.0 to 3.5.  I did have a spattering of other languages (vbscript, C++, FoxBase and FoxPro, Pearl, Java, JavaScript, Etc.) but my primary experience and workload was centered around Visual Basic.

Last year I decided to attempt to fullfill a life long goal of mine and write a book.  I always wanted to write a fantasy novel but I decided to stick with something I seemed to be more familiar with.  Apress was kind enough to allow me to translate a C# book (C# 2005 Recipes) into Visual Basic (Visual Basic 2005 Recipes).  It was very tough work but very rewarding.  I was able to pick up C# very quickly and the entire task was very fulfilling although I must thank my family for being very patient with me and the long hours.  After that book I was asked by the publisher to update it for Visual Studio 2008, which I did.  Visual Basic 2008 Recipes was released earlier this year.

Currently I am working for Berico Technologies.  I was extremely nervous about taking the job initially, was they were a very small (approximately 10 people) company.  The work and people seemed very interesting so I took the plunge.  I have never regretted the decision.  This is by far the best company I have worked for.  The work is fresh and exciting and the company is extremely developer friendly.

Although my current work did not specify which language I had to use, I decided to make a shift and have been programming in C# for the last year.  The work on the earlier book made the transition very easy and I feel very comfortable in either language.  I have also had the joy of spending much time working with Silverlight and I look forward to working with it further.  Recently I finished work as the technical reviewer for Silverlight 2 Recipes by Jit Ghosh and Rob Cameron (two Microsoft employees).

This site is my effort to give something back to the community.  Not every post will be related to programming but there will definitely be enough of them.  I do have other hobbies (building computers and playing games) that offer much material.  I have always wanted to start my own site and I figured now was a perfect time.  I hope you all enjoy at least some of the things I have to say and find something here useful.