I get this question every once in while… “do you write code?” or “do you know… abc technology”?

Here is the short answer:

Yes. I’ve been writing code since I was 10, when my parents bought me my first computer and I stayed up late at night trying to write my own word based adventure games… often referred to as “zorg” games. You may or may not know about them. I wrote my first professional business application when I was 15, for a hospital in France. I was an exchange student at the time and earned an entire week’s worth of skiing in Switzerland for that app. It was a database that kept track of patients and the drugs they were trying for clinical trials.

I write code about every day… sometimes it’s in javascript, visual basic (excel, microsoft access etc), or html but most of the time it’s in T-sql or what’s officially called “transact SQL”. This particular language is a procedural language (hence the name “stored procedure”) that allows you to do lots of cool stuff at the database level. The advantage in this case, is that Deltek Vision has an open database so you can do almost anything to it using T-SQL.

However… the real question that people should ask of me and their consultants is:

“Can you determine what is the thing we need created to automate our business… and can you determine if we should build or buy it… and can you design it, then build it or implement it?”

and

“Do you understand our business and are you interested in providing service and making us buy technology to enhance our bottom line and make our business more efficient as opposed to a lot of other consultants who are only interested in making a quick buck and not really being thorough with what we need and not really developing and meeting a well thought out list of requirements?”

Now THAT is the question you should ask me.

Go ahead… I dare you.