About

Hello there! My name is Josef Finsel and I've been consulting with computers for over 30 years.

Over those years, technology has grown by leaps and bounds. When I started working, networks were expensive things used to link locations over phone lines. Local Area Networks were an engineer's pipe dream and mail was handled by the USPS. If you wanted to send someone something they could see today and they weren't in the same office you were in, you either drove there or sent a fax, incurring long distance charges along the way. Today we can send emails and post picture on the web as soon as they are snapped with your phone, a computer many times more powerful than the ones I started working with.

While techonlogy has changed, however, problem solving hasn't. Solving a problem is as simple as looking at what you need to do, what tools you have to use for solving it and then putting them together to make a workable solution. Sometimes these answers were fairly obvious and easy, but many times the obvious solution was outside the grasp of the average client. When I set up my first web site in 1998, we had static web pages or, if you were lucky, you could have little scripted bits that ran as actual executables on your server to update page counters and the like. Over the years, we've progressed from static HTML to ASP to ASP.NET to MVC, all of which made life easier in so many ways. But still, hosting your own pages gave you a single point of failure, as many sites who experienced the Slashdot effect found out the hard way. Having a site that has enough capacity to support that type of surge means excess capacity sitting around idle most of the time.

Today, however, you don't need a data center with idle capacity, Microsoft (and Google and Amazon) all have cloud computing options available. And, while I have played with the LAMP stack and done my share with Oracle, I'm mostly a Microsoft Developer, dealing with C#, SQL Server and all of the fiddly bits in between. This site is an example of such things, using things I've collected and developed over the years, keeping them updated with the latest technology.