What a wonderful world.

My name is Jason Scherer and welcome to my little world on the internet.To begin on my journey into computers, electronics, and finally programming. My journey started very early in life, so shall we begin?

Electronics and Computers

I started at an early age, maybe 8-10 years old if not younger, taking apart electronics that my grandpa would bring home from his work that may or may not be in a working condition. He would gladly let me take them apart and so would my parents as long as all the bits were in one area, which as a kid was the hardest part.

After this it was awhile before I really did a ton with electronics as this would last for many years until when I was in high school and finally took the time to take some electronics classes. These were so much fun to take. The amount of true things I learned from them were unbelievable.

It started with basic knowledge and learning how to connect components into each other to not have issues. From there we started to do projects that we got to pick. This was a fun time as I believe at the time I picked an amplifier. Was so much fun to make and really want to make another one at some point.

Beyond that I had some fun experiences in that class. Beginning with the teacher accidentally blowing up a kids project by telling him to connect a capacitor incorrectly. The teacher also took a screw driver to show how much charge a capacitor could have. The student that “accidentally” put a screw driver into a socket. From this wonderful classes is where I ended up realizing what I would initially go to school for.

Then came my first degree. I went to Waukesha County Technical College in Wisconsin and got my first degree in Computer Hardware Technician. This degree taught me a ton more with electronics including a ton of critical creative thinking, more soldering work, and finally ways of running a small business. Which brought me to my first degree which was used for the first 6+ years of my career into technology.

Programming

This honestly was something that really was in the back of my head for many years growing up. I remember back when growing up with the family Apply IIGS taking the books that had some code in them, and enjoying slightly modifying it to see what would happen. This would be the beginning of what would become my current career.

After switching jobs as a computer technician, a service technician, and then back to a computer technician, I started to feel like this position might end up being a place that I will not end up happy and excited to come to work daily. My work started to offer education reimbursement and I started to discuss with my wife about maybe going back. It started out being that I would do some networking but she pushed me and asked me if the end I’d want to do development, which I figured I would.

I went back to WCTC to then get my Web and Software Development degree. This degree focused mainly on Java and OOP development. I learned a ton of best practices and design patterns that I still most likely use today but don’t even realize it. This was a super interesting degree and also got me some knowledge of database usage and the beginnings of some C#/ASP.net.

From this I was able to slowly at work move my way into a Software Technician role. For this I began to support and update the major engineering/production software at my company. A, at the time, 12 year old Perl application that is being used to test every computer system at my employer. During this process I started in the engineering department, but slowly in the end was able to move into the IT department and bring the application over to the IT department. This gave some ownership of the application along with having the ability to more focus on the application.

While supporting this application, my wife and I decided to have me get my bachelor’s degree. I ended up doing some research and found, Thomas Edison State University. They offer online education and are accredited college. I first heard about them from one of my teacher at WCTC, he suggested it due to already having dual associate degrees and then wanting a bachelor’s degree. I ended up taking the Bachelor’s of Science in Technical Studies degree and was able to officially get a Bachelor’s degree and become a Software Engineer at my current employer.

Since then has been a huge amount of changes. The old Perl Application is slowly being replaced with a c#/asp.net application with python scripting on the clients. This is a huge project that I have been one of the main leads on this. Along with this I have been the main developer working on the custom built customer portal for outside customers to see their information. These two projects have been great for my learning and expanding my knowledge of development and listening to what people want to gather requirements and to help explain to someone else what maybe involved on a project.

Well this brings us pretty much to current state. At home I’ve now gotten a fully lab setup with a XCP-NG server a “desktop” system in a 2U chassis, a NAS, and a couple of laptops. I’ve created my first pi-hole along with a set of dev servers to tinker with. Really need and want to do a bunch more research to get things rolling on this project. Well until next time, what a wonderful world we live in to be able to learn constantly and gain this knowledge.