Dave's Den

About Me

Introduction

My name is Dave Berthiaume, and I live in the Twin Cities area (Minnesota) with my wife and 2 young kids. I'm presently employed as a Lead Software Engineer at Thomson West. In my spare time, I enjoy my kids, photography, home theater and camping in the north woods. I also have a moderately sized collection of breweriana, consisting mostly of old Hamm's Beer signs and advertising.

*** NOTE: I get a lot of questions along the lines of "Is my piece rare?" or "How much is my piece worth?". While I appreciate the interest in my opinions, the unfortunate fact is that I have not been active on the breweriana trading scene since 2002. While I still enjoy my collection, due to financial constraints (family) I am no longer keeping up on the going rates for breweriana items. I suggest Beerlights, The Hamm's Club or even eBay if you're looking for an appraisal of your item.

This Site

Dave's Den is powered by Textpattern, a robust, free, open source, PHP-based content management system that I highly recommend. I don't know PHP at all, and the beauty of Textpattern is that I don't have to.

My Geek Life

I first became interested in computers through the magic of video games. Back in the late 70's and early 80's when the first wave of video game mania hit, my folks bought for me and my brothers the much coveted Atari 2600 gaming system. Our house had always been the neighborhood hangout for our friends, but this took it to the next level. We'd spend hours in front of our old Zenith TV (which didn't even have a remote control) blasting away at each other. Soon, along came a shiny new system called ColecoVision, and we drooled over the prospect of playing these incredible new games while still being able to enjoy our old Atari games by plugging them into a special "expansion module" on the ColecoVision.

This system ruled our house until one day Coleco announced the Adam computer. This thing had a cassette tape drive for loading programs, played all of our ColecoVision games, and came with a spiffy keyboard and a daisy wheel printer. It even included some newfangled "word processing" program and something called a "SmartBasic" language. I had to have one. I still remember combing the stores daily, waiting for that magical day when I could actually hold one in my clammy hands. When I finally did get one home, I was hooked on computers for good. Not only could I play games on this thing, but I could actually get it to DO STUFF myself by typing in certain commands. How cool is that?

Eventually the flaws of the Adam were exposed. The tape drive was crap, and the printer was so loud you had to shout over it to be heard. Anyhow, by that time something else had caught my eye: The Atari 800XL computer. This thing was a sexy-looking newcomer that had an external 5 1/4" floppy disc drive. Not only were the games better, but now you could program it to do more and more things as well. I eventually daisy-chained 4 floppy drives together, bought a modem, and ran the first Atari-based 2400 baud bulletin board system in the Twin Cities.

After this point, over the years, I would upgrade to each new Atari model as it became available (130XE, the ST line). I found myself using them less for games, and more for doing things that were actually useful. After many great years with my Ataris, I finally cut over and bought my first 386/20 MHz PC in 1989 after I had landed my first professional programming job. I was hired to write DOS-based applications using the Clipper language, which was just a fancy DBase compiler. I honed my programming skills while this new thing, Windows, was gaining prominence.

In 1994, I made the jump to Windows development by becoming proficient at PowerBuilder. Client/server programming was all the rage back then, and Powerbuilder allowed you to create distributed applications with a "beautiful" GUI interface. I earned a few certifications, and eventually tried my hand at formal classroom teaching. I would split my time between consulting at client sites, and public Powerbuilder training at our company's office.

Then the internet came along, and everything changed again. The folks who created PowerBuilder created a new development environment called SilverStream. SilverStream actually allowed you to create a web application- very cool at the time. My company made a strong move from Powerbuilder to SilverStream, so I went along for the ride. I cut my Java chops creating SilverStream applications for clients, and went on to teach SilverStream as well. It was a nicely designed tool, but being very proprietary, was soon bypassed as more and more businesses migrated to open platforms and tools.

Today

Up until 2007, I was creating Java servlet/JSP applications, with IntelliJ IDEA my Java development tool of choice. In the summer of 2007 I made the leap from Java to C# and ASP.NET as a Lead Software Engineer at Thomson West, where I work on infrastructure projects and create reusable user interface components for the Westlaw online research tool.