Recently, I just started working for SC Johnson in Racine, WI. I am very excited to be apart of the team at SCJ. After the years of hearing nothing but great things about the business, I finally have the opportunity to join the team and experience the world of SCJ first hand.

It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to get into SCJ. It took a few attempts to secure an interview, but the patience definitely paid off. I can give most of credit my school, UW-Whitewater, for helping me get in touch with the SCJ representatives. Fortunately, SCJ has UW-Whitewater defined as a recruiting school and I was able to meet with them a few times throughout the year.

A lot of people ask me, “If you had your own business, then why would you go work for someone?”. It’s simple. I wanted a new challenge. I wanted to learn what it is like for a large corporation. The demands for IT in small businesses and large businesses are vastly different. Both types of businesses have different perspectives and needs with computer systems.

Luckily, I was placed on the exact project that I wanted, working with VMware and other cloud technologies. The company is wonderful to their employees and provides many excellent benefits to their employees and the employee’s families. Almost everyone is really laid back and welcoming. I always find people being open to sit down and have a short discussion how things are going or they make themselves available to make sure questions can get answered.

SC Johnson is a wonderful experience for me. I am very thankful that I am fortunate enough to have an opportunity to work for SC Johnson and I look forward to what the rest of the summer will bring.

As required for all other Information Technology Majors at UW-Whitewater, we are required to take a class called ITBE 451: IT Project Management. It was such a great experience for me. It was taught by an excellent professor, Sara Deschner. This class was so cool! Sara actually went out and talked to other businesses that were interested in having a group of college students work on an IT related project. I already had Sara as a professor before this class, so I could really tell that she was excited when she came back and told us that we had a project to work on for CUNA Mutual Group. Read more …

Lake Country Market was a great experience for me. I was approached by them to help with the IT and the website. When they were telling me their goals of what they would like to do with the website, I knew exactly what to give them. By implementing a WordPress installation, it gave them the power for a great looking website but it also allowed them to edit the content on their own. The reason on why it was such a great experience for me was because they were my first actual client that I used WordPress to solve their IT needs. The website installation went very smooth and it met the demands of what the business needed. I checked their search engine rankings the other day and they seem to be working really well on some of the keywords that I was typing into Google. I am glad that it worked out for them!

Check out their website here: http://www.lakecountrymarket.com

The Secure Upload Project for Fiber-Tech Inc. was the second phase of the Fiber-Tech CMS Implementation. This was a challenge. We had to accept very large internet files from clients securely but we had to minimize bandwidth use. Problem was, my Dad didn’t want to wait to download these huge files. He really was trying to get me to have them upload right to Fiber-Tech’s main server. I refused because there were way too many security vulnerabilities associated with uploading to a server that ran Active Directory, Email, and other services. So instead I used Lynn Schattner with Cyber Solutions to program a form that I could embed via IFRAME. It turned out pretty good, the only thing that really stinks is that they couldn’t get it to work with Firefox due to a software limitation. All in all, many engineers use Internet Explorer so it wasn’t a major down turn for the most part. Read more …

I joined the Whitewater Student Government as the IT Director for the 2009-2010 school year. My responsibilities included maintaining the website, researching new technologies for the organization,  and many other things. One of my main projects was to conduct research on a possible new solution for the Whitewater Student Government Housing Guide. The one that was currently in operation was programmed in ASP by another student. The software worked fairly well, but we wanted to add a few features and the current software was very buggy. So I began my months of research in the Fall of 2009, looking for where we could implement a new software solution that would grant the Whitewater Student Government the most stable, scalable software platform while maintaining data ownership of their listings. Read more …

Since I had such good luck with the Aquaducks WordPress installation, my Dad’s company needed a new website… badly. I went ahead and worked with my friend Dave Gruentzel and Mike Bever to get the website up. Dave took care of the photography and help with some stuff on the WordPress. I worked with Mike to get the content web ready as well. Once we got it live, it turned out perfect. It gave them such a great internet presence compared to a lot of the other manufacturing company websites out there.

Another feature that I worked with implementing was a custom programmed secure uploading form so that my Dad could take a look at potential work. Read about that here.

Check out what it used to look like: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.fiber-techinc.com

Now check it out here: http://www.fiber-techinc.com

The Brown’s Lake Aquaducks is a water ski team located in Burlington, WI. I joined in 1998 and I have been on the team ever since. As I grew up and I got more and more into computers, I started helping the team a lot with running the audio equipment for the show and also helping out with the website. We used to use NetObjects Fusion. It was pretty much a 100% WYSIWYG software. After that, I programmed the site myself using straight up HTML and CSS but the management was way too difficult. So instead, I looked online and found WordPress. I looked at all the other CMS solutions that were free, but I hated the user experience that they provided. When I started working with WordPress, I fell in love. It was such a great software that installed itself and it worked great for what I needed to do. No more using FTP! All of my management was done from a Microsoft Word-like editor. It was something simple that I could use and if I needed to dive into some advanced coding, it was a click of a button and I was back to programming from scratch. All in all, it was great for me to use and it was perfect if anyone else needed to take over the website.

Check out the website here: http://www.aquaducks.org

The 2009 Aquaducks: The Movie was my 2009 presentation for the end of the year banquet. Very similar to the 2008 Slideshow, but better! Check out the trailer here:

RE Sales was one of my first software integration projects. I got the job from a recommendation from a very good client of mine. At first I was a little overwhelmed with his software idea, but I knew of the right people and technology that I needed to get it done. I did some of the programming, but I also had a very talented web designer, Sam Potts, whom I met years ago through another friend. Sam is from Australia and works for E-Trade Australia as a Web Developer. He is extremely talented. What we had to do was to develop a complete custom software that would allow Tom (from RE Sales) to sell his light bulbs and forward all of the orders to a vendor via email. Tom had an existing website, but it wasn’t structured correctly nor was it complete. I worked with Tom to take down all of his goals and visions with what he would like the software to do. It took about two months to develop, but it went up very smooth. Sam and I met via Skype frequently to work to complete the project. For me it was about 9PM and for him is was about 12PM the next day. Read more …

The Aquaducks slideshow is something that I have been doing since 2002. It is a presentation that I make every year at our end of the year banquet. It is a lot of pressure for me to do a good job because so much anticipation is waiting for the release of every slide show. When it first started out, the people who made it used Power Point to present picture slide shows. So when I started, I used Power Point as well. Dwight Schrute from The Office TV Series says it best, “Power Point is boring. No body likes Power Point.” So I finally took it to the next level in 2008. After 3 months of production, the entire project was compiled of only videos. The entire movie length was around 42 minutes. Although it was a lot of work, it paid off. Check out the intro to the movie here: