Back Among the Ranks of the Gainfully Employed

Yay for me! I started today as the User Interface Developer for DotNetNuke Corporation today – a small company managing a Web Content Management Server application also called DotNetNuke (DNN) written for ASP.NET and SQL Server.  There’s a marked similarity to NCompass Labs in its early days, so I kind of feel like I’m going back to my roots (I started at NCompass as a "Demo Programmer" writing "smoke and mirrors UI" code in VB which sat on top of the alpha-product code and emulated the planned behaviour to be used at Trade Shows and to attract Investor interest.

DNN is actually an open source project and there is a basic version of the software available for download free of charge and it can be installed against Microsoft SQL Server Express which is also a free download. The Professional version of the software has a subscription cost associated with it (which is what "monetizes" DNN) and provides customers with full technical support, end user and administrator documentation, and several features that are unavailable to the free version.

Because the product is open source its evolution has mainly been dominated by the predilections and preferences of developers and therefore had only a minimum of focus on usability and interaction design. DNN Corp was looking for someone with skills as a user experience designer and a front-end developer – that is, someone with the background to provide design requirements and user centered design processes to the product while also being able to produce shippable UI code based on these designs. So, my new role will actually be split between User Experience design and Front-End Development and this has me really excited because it means making full use of the development skills I renewed by earning my Programmer Analyst/Web Developer Diploma (with Honours!) last year.

I’m pretty excited – my first day went quite well – and I’m certainly looking forward to tomorrow and beyond.

:-j(enni)