Welcome to P1 for Jeffrey (Jeff) Linson

Basic Bio:

After earning a B.S. in Chemistry from Yale, I spent ten years in engineering and business positions before settling into a career in business software development and project management. I've spent over ten years developing internal customer service, marketing and accounting applications for major corporations such as Pepsico, Pfizer, AIG and SeaLand (now part of Maersk). Most of that development involved C++, PowerBuilder frontends hitting Sybase or SQL Server databases running on Unix or Windows servers.

To add more formal training to my resume and expand my skills in the current web-centric world, I'm pursuing a masters degree in computer science through the Harvard Extension School. I'm looking to grow a consulting business developing business CMS and ecommerce sites using open source tools such as Joomla and Magento Commerce. I'm also getting familiar with the Yii Framework as one way to expedite development.

Jeff (headshot)

Current Development Tools

  • Basic Text Editor: Notepad ++ - comparable to Sublime Text; hugely popular; frequently updated.
  • HTML Editor (trial): CoffeeCup - used for this project; more current than my old copy of Dreamweaver.
  • HTML Editor (dated): Dreamweaver MX Studio - not updated due to expense; now all in the Cloud.
  • PHP Editor: CodeLobster - works nicely with Joomla, Yii Framework and JQuery.
  • Project IDE: Eclipse with Aptana Studio plugin - still wrestling with all the features; supports Git.
  • HTML Inspector/Validator: Firebug & HTML Tidy for Firefox - really sheds light on dark places.
  • Data Modeling Tool: MySQL Workbench - used ER/Win (now ER/Studio), but I mostly work with MySQL now.
  • FTP & SSH: SmartFTP - guess I'll be using the FTP less and the SSH terminal more; nice tool, but Filezilla & PuTTY cover most of the features.

Outside of corporate environments, all my web development has been on Linux web hosts (typical LAMP stacks). Previously I used XAMPP for a localhost. As part of this class I've installed WAMP for comparison. While I've used version control in the past (e.g. PVCS, SCCS and PowerBuilder Native), I'm new to Git.

Hobbies and Miscellaneous

Outside of my interests in science and technology, I try to spend as much time as possible outdoors either on a bike or on skis. My skiing improved greatly during my years just after college when I was living in the Adirondacks working for International Paper.

I'm currently living in Cold Spring, New York, on the Hudson River just across from West Point. While that is outside the New England states, I'm not that far from the Connecticut border. I hope to venture up to Cambridge to attend some of the lectures in person. However, the online (Live!) access to the lectures and class materials is extremely convenient. Rather different than when I was an undergrad.