Introduction

This page will contain a more detailed version of the knowledge and experience that I have gained using the C/C++ programming language. It will expand on the information that is contained within my official resume available here. I will discuss when, where and what I have learned using the C and C++ programming languages.

C

Work Experience

I have exclusively used the C programming language mainly within my first two jobs at Ranmar and Bell Sygma. While I have also used C at other jobs but those have been in conjunction with C++ which will be expanded within the next section. In this section, I expand on how I’ve used the C programming language within the context of the two jobs I mentioned above.

The use of the C programming language within Ranmar entailed the development of a financial software that was used by one or more customers. The software used a client-server architecture where the client was initially a dos program that would access a server that was running on IBM AIX operating system. When I started at the job, the product was fairly mature and I was initially asked to fix bugs. These included simple fixes to the software that allowed me to get aquainted with the software. I was then asked to add a major addition to the product that offered a new feature of the product. This required that I had to understand how menu was generated using function pointers. This project was developed such that it would use the feature of being able to communicate with the server. After completing this work on the product, my manager asked me to work on upgrading the product from using a dos terminal client to using a windows client. This work required that I create a protocol that was used by the windows client such that the server can dynamically generate a given window on the windows client that would be able to process the same set of functionality that the dos client terminal was processing. Since, the browser was still not what it is now and we were using Windows 3.1. I was not able to take advantage of all the advantage that a web browser was able to offer. In that respect, the creation of a simple protocol that provided the necessary functionality to perform similar tasks as the dos client terminal was a challenge in itself.

While at Bell Sygma I was developing a product from scrarch that required that I design two different application that would perform different tasks. There is a program that needed to receive data from a DMS switch which is major telephone switch. The data will contain information about the different incoming telephone calls. This information was defined by a protocol that was designed by the DMS switch company. I needed to be able to process the incoming data and transform the data into a format that was then stored on disk. The protocol was defined such that I could be able to handle any upgrades to the DMS switch protocol. The protocol was designed such that any changes to the data structure will only include the addition of fields and not removal of fields. The reader application needed to be designed such that any protocol changes will not cause the application to fail. I decided to then implement this feature using an array of functions where each of the functions will extract different information from the data that was sent by the DMS switch.

Non-work Experience

C++

While, my first 6+ years was spent exclusively using the C programming language, the use of the C++ programming language experience did not follow a similar path. Most of my experience with the C++ programmig language was within the confines of working concurrently with Java and C# though mainly with Java. The bulk of my experience using the C++ programming language was when I was working at Riverbed/Aternity. That said, I have also used the C++ programming language at Progress Software and CIBER. While my experience with Veritech was short lived since this was a startup that didn’t progress fair. I will then describe my experience with the C++ programming language.

I started to use the C++ with Veritech while creating a video game framework using MFC. The use of C++ within this context wasn’t much but it gave me chance to learn somewhat about the Microsoft MFC framework.

Libraries

This section will describe the different libraries that I have used to develop the different products using C/C++.