[Gnumed-devel] Introducing myself

[Les Ferguson]

Hi people, sorry to bother your technical chat etc, but I thought I should say 
hello & introduce myself a little.

I am a software developer living in Waitakere, New Zealand.  I have 
specialised in health information systems development for at least 15 years 
now.  This has ranged from several legacy database systems (Pick, UniData, 
PrimeOS) thru to Windows (VB etc) and then web based clinical intranet 
systems using ASP and VB, SQL Server and similar.

Areas I have worked in over the years include laboratory data collection & 
reporting, lab analyser interfaces, HL7 transactioning systems, ambulatory 
care & scheduling systems, and a variety of different packages for admin, 
inventory & reporting etc around the hospital, pharmacy & laboratories.

I am currently unemployed, as I am studying something completely different at 
unitech, but have an interest in doing some meaningful software work as an 
alternative to playing internet games & generally wasting time at home in the 
evenings (yes television is boring here in NZ too).

My home machine has been running Linux for several years now, as I have been 
learning how to handle it, and looking into many different programming 
languages and scripting languages on Linux.  My problem is I have not been 
able to make a solid decision on which technology to go with, which language 
to get serious on, and knowing if end-users out there want something to run 
on a  particular desktop environment, web client, or whatever.

You guys seem to have combined a good amount of work in Gnumed, and I would 
love to get in there & help with some debugging & maybe eventually start 
adding some features myself, if anybody has the time & patience to do a 
little hand-holding & point me at something to get my teeth into.  I can now 
do the basics with CVS but I am not too sure where to go from there.

Note: whatever you have heard people say about Visual Basic breeding lazy and 
stupid developers, its probably all true.  I usedta be much more creative and 
adventurous before I started using VB, which is why I am trying to get away 
from it now :)

-- 
Les Ferguson
(lhf AT xtra DOT co DOT nz)