I am your host, Mike Witters. I am a Technical Architect at WinWholesale, a national wholesaler. In this position I serve as the lead developer of Java/JEE applications and server as the technical lead on most of the system integration projects that will use Java and other modern technologies. I also get to do a lot of research of new technologies/open source projects/and languages to see where we can use them to fulfill strategic goals.
I have spent the past 14+ years in the software development industry. I have worked with mainframe technologies (COBOL, CICS, JCL, etc.), FoxPro, VB, Smalltalk, and Java; with Smalltalk and Java being the biggest portion of my career. I have also spent over 3 years with a focus on Enterprise Content Management using DB2 Content Manager. I have been an Object-Oriented developer and designer for 9 years. I was a presenter at the IBM WebSphere Portal and Content Manager Technical Conference in 2004 and have lead several training sessions on the Java Programming language, JEE, Object-Oriented Development and Design, and eXtreme Programming Principles.
I serve as a member of Miami University’s Computer and Information Technology Advisory council. In this capacity I help guide the direction that the university takes when developing curricula and programs for current and incoming information technology students.
My favorite part of my career is designing and developing software. I do find the infrastructure stuff (server architectures, installation, and configuration) interesting, but its more cut and dry and it depends heavily on vendor support – designing and writing the software is somewhat of an art form and there’s always a solution that can be written to solve the problem with little more than your keyboard and some creative thinking.
I have a wife and two wonderful children, a Wii, a guitar, a DSLR camera, two telescopes, two grills (one gas and one charcoal), an HDTV, several rarely used woodworking tools, and a crappy old linux server. I wouldn’t trade any of it. I used to be one heck of a gamer, but my age and the next generation of kids that play internet games today make me feel like a n00b everytime I join a game of Battlefield 2142 or Counter-Strike – I used to pwn on the FPS games 🙂
mikewitters.com 
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