So since the last time I posted, a lot of things have developed since I worked at SC Johnson. Since my rotation ended, I was offered a position to work for SC Johnson but I respectfully turned it down to start a new business, 521 Dimensions. I have co-founded 521 Dimensions with my business partner, Dan Pastori.

What does 521 Dimensions do?

At 521 Dimensions, we create websites and web applications for businesses of all sizes. Most of you know what a website is, but I often get asked, “What the heck is a web application?”. A web application is computer software that you can use through your web browser (instead of installing it on your computer), like Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. All of these applications are very popular web applications. When I tell someone that, I usually get asked, “Are you going to make the next Facebook?” The answer is no. Facebook is already created and we are focusing are applications for businesses right now. Hopefully we will make just as much money as them though!

What is Server Side Up and Project Community Computers?

Server Side Up and Project Community Computers is 521 Dimensions‘ way of giving back. We want to give better opportunity to people who may not even know that they have an opportunity. We decided to incorporate Dan’s organization called, Project Community Computers, which was founded in 2008. Project Community Computers is a (soon to be) non-profit organization that takes in donated computers, cleans them up, and builds schools around the world. The last trip was out to Kenya, which was really cool to see what they did (I was not apart of the organization at the time when they went). The pictures are neat to look at because these people have never seen a computer before, so just imagine the excitement they experienced! Here is a picture from Kenya in 2010:

At Server Side Up, we blog about technology and business as we grow and expand our business. All of our posts are geared for technology entrepreneurs or technical administrators/developers that are looking for free online resources for learning new technologies. Every once in a while, we share a story or two about what we learned in a certain project or personal experience and how we handled it. It’s not going to be easy to start our own business, so we figured that we should document and share what we learn with others who are starting to do the same. Server Side Up also puts on free learning events that people can attend and learn about Information Technology. This is extremely exciting for me because I love sharing my passion with others. In most of the classes that I teach, I end up learning something from someone else anyways. It is great to see how motivated people are to learn and how “hungry” they can be to gain experience and knowledge about Information Technology. Here is a picture from one of the events:

Bottom line, we have a lot of work to do and we have to keep a positive hat on for moving forward. Thanks for your interest! If you have any questions, I would be glad to answer them!

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.

Meetings are toxic. Drug dealers get it right.Your estimates suck. Shocked? These are the kind of phrases that you will hear from the authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson with their book Rework.This New York Times Bestseller is an entrepreneurial book based on the story of 37signals.com, a provider of popular online collaboration software. The things that you read will be against the “norm”, but most of their points make sense. The main focus of the book is to keep things simple and maintain a focus. It is a compilation of great advice that every business owner or employee should read.

When I first heard about Rework, I was immediately interested and ordered it right away. Two days later, I received my box from Amazon, opened the book, and nearly finished the entire book in one night. The entire book is compiled of short essays, which are very straight forward and easy to understand. I am not even a fast reader and I finished up most of the book in about 4-5 hours.

Even though the book is fairly short, it is definitely worth the money. Reading it once will not do you justice either. There is an abundance of quality advice and suggestions that most business people will face throughout their career. Fried and Hansson do an excellent job at providing examples that prove their point. Some situations may be difficult to apply, since it is the story of 37signals.com, but most of their examples can be adapted to any real life business situation.

If you are looking into a book that gives you words from experience on building a successful product, you will enjoy this book. The authors are extremely smart and cut the fat when it comes to proving their point. It will initiate/continue your motivation and will also serve as a great cheat sheet when making major business decisions.

Check out the book’s website here. I would highly recommend it!

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.

Unfortunately, I cannot post any information regarding what the project was about due to confidentiality concerns but it was such an excellent experience for me. I was really motivated when my peers nominated me to lead the project as well with another student. As soon as I got the leadership role, I put on my game face. What we had to research was very broad, so the initial phase of the project was extremely difficult to narrow down on what was business necessary and what was business luxury. Another challenge was establishing a form of communication that everyone could use from anywhere. We ended up using Google Wave (which is no longer being supported by Google) but it worked great for us. It was pretty cool to give that a test drive while working on a large project. Worst case scenario, we had email to communicate with each other.

Another exciting part about the project was that we got to travel to CUNA Mutual’s headquarters two times to give a presentation. They were very impressed on what we discovered and we had a great discussion throughout the whole presentation. Since I had so much presenting experience, I let other get the opportunity to present to a large group. I did run the Q&A session at the end, but that was an easy job to moderate the discussion. Overall, this class project taught me a lot of delegating responsibilities and who will step up and who needs to be told what to do. It was very difficult to communicate with people at times, but we all did a great job. I was fortunate enough to have a great class and we all got along and worked together. This project was the best class project that I have ever had.

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

I helped develop the application plan and design. You can view the document below, or you can look at the live site here: http://www.fiber-techinc.com/upload-a-file/

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.

I first spoke with Cyber Solutions, who fixed an upload issue with the prior housing guide before. They brought forth their already developed solution that was completely customizable. I was pretty interested, so I sent them a development concept to see if it was feasible. That document is located here:

After I sent the documentation off to Cyber Solutions, a student approached me asking me if he could propose a solution to the senate. I agreed to take in all bidders. His solution was to embed a Joomla based website that would host the housing guide. Our final path that we could take was to implement a new housing guide on our own using a software like Joomla or WordPress. The hardest part about my job was to take all of this technical jargin and translate it into English so that the senate could make an educated decision. The best way to do it was to break everything down into pieces, so I looked at all the solutions advantages and disadvantages carefully and scored each solutions strengths and weaknesses on a points system. I gave a presentation at the end of my research recommending which solution would be best. View the presentation here:

Even though I gave my recommendation, the senate decided not to change anything with the housing guide. There were a few political left hooks thrown and some VERY long meetings that changed the course of the housing guide. Long story short, I learned a lot on how a government organization works. It was a great experience for me and it is something that I would never regret in my life. There were some great people that I networked with while serving on the Whitewater Student Government and I felt honored to work with many of the people in the organization. It was one of the best experiences that I have had on campus. I also reinforced a lot of my experience with many technologies.

Technologies that I used as WSG IT Director:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. ASP
4. PHP
5. Apache Web Server
6. MySQL
7. Microsoft Access
8. SQL Programming
9. Microsoft Visio
10. Adobe Photoshop
11. Adobe Illustrator

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