r a jakobson

Who I am...

Robert Allan Jakobson (the guy with the gray hair to the left).... is a mid-40s Program Manager, Software Developer and Designer and reluctant sometime author.
[It even says so on my business cards and so it must be true right?]   

What I've been up to... 

This last year has been about getting back to my development skills roots.  Even though the "title" says "Regional Management" - I actually do a lot of coding and working with eCommerce customers to get their ERP systems to talk to AT&T's systems and get people cell phones. Not the most thrilling work - and not cutting edge per se (although we've managed to connect systems in ways no ones ever attempted this year), it's allowed me to get into the roots of software again. 

After 5 years of working driving software, I felt I was losing touch with both how customers really think - and how software is really used and developed.  It's a personal philosophy of mine that you can't know how someone really does their job, or how someone really uses a tool, or how they think... until you do what they do.  So when given a chance to not only drive software development but develop software and work with customers - seemed a good fit for my needs.

You can read about some of the public versions of the tools I've created and been working on lately - even a few screen shots of the public versions here .  If I get the time I'll clean the code I've done that's for public consumption and post it here for others to play with. 

You can read more about this at this blog entry...