Jonathan Bishop

Hello. Welcome to my index page. Throughout the class I will update the links to the left so that you can come here to view all of my assignments as I do them.

My background is diverse. I attended a Javascript class at Folsom Lake College in 2002. I suspect things have changed some, since then. Prior to that class, I also attended a Visual Basic programming class in the fall of 2000. I come from the days of DOS and have written Basic programs and batch files. I installed linux before it was easy. I know how to write a shell script and can read a log file. I know a little Perl and more then a little, but not a whole lot of PHP. I've dabbled in Java, but never really dedicated enough time to learn it. I've written a couple Android and iPhone apps, but only by following step by step tutorials. I understand basic programming concepts, and I'm really good at writing code-by-google when I need to figure out how to get something done.

At home, I run a Linux server that's primary duty is media storage and DVR functionality. Since the DVR already required a MySQL server, I went ahead and installed a LAMP stack, and run a small web page with a little bit of PHP and a little bit of MySQL. It doesn't have any interactivity (no AJAX, or Javascript at all for that matter) but it has the links stored in a database, and I put the basic framework in place to make it a database driven page. I just don't really have a purpose for it, other than to store a couple links.

At work I have a very unique department. We are first level support for the systems administration team. We also manage the software stack that inderfaces between the Microsoft Active Directory Server and our Unix/Linux LDAP authentication. Then we manage all the Apache servers which are mostly just reverse proxies, however I do have a few LAMP stacks set up. We also manage the orchestration platform that the company uses to automate tasks. We just started deploying a Splunk server to analyze log data. Finally when we're not busy with all of that we're developing workflows for the orchestration platform and programming a web site, called the Dashboard, on our company intranet.

I am attending this class to help expand my client side scripting skills to support the Dashboard. The web site is an attempt to realize the "Single Pane of Glass" that so many sales teams have sold our management in the software products we now use around the company. Our dashboard is able to interface with most of those applications by making PHP SOAP calls to the orchestration engine. We have been trying to improve the interactivity of the site, and recently started dabbling in AJAX. That lead me to enroll in this class.