Seth Vance's Autobiography

General

My name is Seth Vance, welcome to my website’s about me page. As the homepage says, I am a programmer, system administrator, computer technician, photographer, teacher, and student living in Charlotte, North Carolina.

For the last four years, I have been a technology teacher at a private school. Teaching has been an incredibly rich and rewarding experience. I started as this school's IT administrator and took over teaching as a result of the COVID pandemic. In addition to this, I have many personal clients to whom I provide a broad spectrum of IT services.

I also enjoy discussing technological news and trends and plan on posting much more frequently to my blog here in the near future. I have a much more old-school mentality when it comes to development: namely, to borrow from a cliched saying- that cutting corners causes longer detours. What do I use to build programs? Not IDEs. And I encourage anyone interested in improving their development skills to follow me in this action. Everything website or web application I create using KATE, the greatest text editor of all time (followed by VIM, sorry eMacs fans) and Firefox. Every program I build is built using KATE and Konsole (it isn't that I do not like gnome, but KDE Plasma is definitely my preferred desktop environment). Every database I design is created using KATE, phpMyAdmin, and good old fashion pen-and-paper. I genuinely believe libraries and IDEs, while certainly convenient, are causing programmers to become sloppier, less precise, and more disconnected from what they are actually doing.I love programming, whether it be high level scripts with PHP and PERL or building programs and games in lower level languages like C++. I do, however, have a deep, visceral hatred of Python- a topic I plan on writing an in-depth blog post on in the near future.

I enjoy security and performance and believe that IT professionals and developers should always strive to have a strong understanding of these concepts in all projects that they create. This being said, however, I am also not a fan of the over-dependence both society and the individual has developed over the last decade or so and as such believe that the development community should be moving in a direction away from greater centralization of services and further dependence on systems and return to the balanced world of the past when technology served humankind, and did not permeate every aspect of our daily lives, controlling and pacifying humanity into a general malaise. I will be writing extensively on this concept in my blog.

Professional

I have the most experience working with PHP, SQL, C++, Java, PERL, HTML, and CSS. The vast majority of my programming experience is within the realm of back-end web application development. I have also completed large automation projects that spanned database work, programming, and full stack development. Read more about my largest project to date below.

Currently I...

• Teach general computer skills, programming, practical security and safety, graphic design, web design, and video editing to middle and high school students at a small private school in Matthews, NC
• Work on a myriad of open source and closed projects, read more below
• Offer back-end development services for SQL, PHP, and PERL based projects.
• Offer website building services
• Offer broad IT services to business in & around the Charlotte, NC area.

Here are some quick notes about my and my skills:

• Extensive experience as a computer hardware technician, with a focus on wholesale upgrades, repairs, & refurbishment.
• Years of technician experience with all major brands including Dell, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo.
• Years of experience with network design & installation, including experience with Ubiquiti Edge, Ubiquiti UniFi, Cisco IOS, Aruba Networks, Netgear, and others.
• In terms of programming I have extensive web application development work both personally & professionally.

Personal

I try to keep my personal life fairly private; however, here is a little section about some of my interests and hobbies. I do sincerely enjoy development and love the process of creating new things. You can read more about my projects both below on this page, as well as my projects page. In addition to this, I enjoy the occasional video game, such as Minecraft, Insurgency: Sandstorm, Firewatch, the original Lego Star Wars games, Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005), Galaga, the original two Sim City games, the Portal games, Call of Duty 1 & 4, GTA:V, Call of Duty Black Ops:III Zombies, and more.

I love travel and adventure and I used to take day trips to the mountains or beach frequently. One of my all time favorite pass-times has been photographing waterfalls in the North Carolina mountains. I have uploaded many of these waterfalls to my photography page. In addition to all of this, I also enjoy hiking, urban exploration in abandoned buildings (though I rarely do this anymore), camping, and more!

Knowledge is a wonderful thing, and knowledge comes in all sorts of forms! I constantly read articles, publications, websites, and books on a myriad of different subjects I enjoy, such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, technology, politics, economics, and more.

I love watching and analyzing television programs and movies. I love Science Fiction, with some of my favorite shows and movies being Star Wars, Stargate and The Twilight Zone. My favorite movie of all time is Bladerunner: 2049, and I am a huge fan of the Bladerunner universe, including the original book. My favorite show of all time is the 1998 Shinishiro Watanabe masterpiece that is Cowboy Bebop. I will write more about Cowboy Bebop at a later date, but I love the concept of the Space Western as a whole and have basically loved every single show or movie written in or around this genre. A controversial opinion I will defend to the death is... and prepare yourself... Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace is a perfect, flawless, beautiful masterpiece. This is not a joke. This is not a contrarian talking point. This is a real, legitimate belief and I can and will defend it.

Reach out!

Hey there! Want to chat? Agree or disagree with anything I have said here? Need IT assistance in the Charlotte area? Just want to connect or be friends? What to fight me tooth and nail on why The Phantom Menace is a masterpiece? Click the button below for my contact information:

General

My first sojourn into the world of computer science was directed by one of my all time favorite childhood television programs “Digimon” (any other digi-fans out there?). Every Saturday morning- I never missed an episode. A young me loved the concept of the wild unknown masked behind the real-life digital landscape. Because of this, I did some research on our family’s Gateway 2000 and began my journey in 2002 of learning HTML. Renting a book from my local library, I began making web page on anything and everything of interest to me. Later launching my first web page about lighthouses (another one of my many interests) in 2004.

Throughout my childhood I continued to learn a great deal about computer science and cyber security from my grandfather, a senior security architect for NASA at the time, a huge inspiration in my life. I had the unique experience of getting to help him with a few network security projects at NASA and learn directly from him, in a hands-on real world approach in my late childhood.

In my early teens, I began branching out to other areas, learning the basics …(get it?) of Parallax BASIC Stamp and Microsoft Visual Basic. Later, also learning some Java and PERL.

SVSK Minecraft (2009 - 2010)

In 2009 a radical new game was released… the greatest java applet game of all time: Minecraft. I was a very early adopter of Minecraft and still enjoy the game from time to time today, 14 years later. As an early adopter of not only the game itself, but the rich and diverse community of server software that came out as well, I learned a great deal of my earliest understandings of networking, administration, Linux, SQL, and security.

NuclearSTORM (2010 - 2016)

Forwarding a bit into my later teens, and early twenties I continued to host and run a live and active community of Minecraft and related servers. At this point I was leading a small team of administrators, developers, and moderators that I had assembled to build and run an online gaming community named “Nuclear STORM”, a random and strange reference to a Christmas Special episode of the BBC hit show Doctor Who- specifically towards the end of the David Tennant era.

Throughout the course of this project, two close friends and I created and maintained (much from scratch) private in-house plugins, a forum, several websites, an IRC server, and a series of gaming servers and even some light content creation.

The community I felt in the creation and maintaining of the Nuclear STORM system was enriching, fun, and provided me an outlet during many a bad time in my personal life. Unfortunately, this was a massive time commitment and as I became busier and busier with other projects, I eventually retired from the role of project lead, and allowed the other senior team members take over. For about a year things declined until eventually there were no more of the original administrators to continue running everything, and I finally shut down the servers and killed off what was left of the community. The last services that were canceled were a series of virtually hosted Minecraft servers for many of our community members who wanted private hosting. This was a very early instance of something like “Realms” before realms became a thing and a clever invention of server resource sharing devised by my friend Drew and I at the time. This was a mournful time in my life, but I looked forward to newer projects ahead.

Common-Loran LLC (2015 - 2018)

Common-Loran was the first of these projects. Started with two of my friends from NuclearSTORM, it was an IT services and Web Design Company for businesses in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. Along side development partners Lemmmy, Brian, and Michael, and fantastic business partner Joshua, we built many advanced websites for people in the Charlotte area, as well as assisted a myriad of businesses in the region with the expansion of their IT needs- including servers, networking, application and automation design, and more.

In addition to this, there was a series of applications that we had planned to create, and even developed but did not release. This included games, weather applications, and a series of other tools.

Common-Loran was a name that I created before we formed. For those unaware, LORAN was (is) a navigational technology similar to the time-based triangulation systems behind GPS technology; however, the signals a LORAN receiver use come from Earth-based broadcast stations instead of orbital satellites. These were fantastic early navigation technology ideas that are still used today, but they were very uncommon. The idea of a Common LORAN was the idea of bringing the unaffordable or the unimaginable for a small business well into their grasp.

Unfortunately, eventually, due to issues with time constraints, Common-Loran was dissolved amicably; though, sadly many of our internal application that we worked towards were never finished nor released.

New Day Computers LLC (2016 - 2020)

This was a former computer repair and wholesale refurbished distributor for whom I worked for a number of years. I did technician work here of all types. The main improvement I made here was in regards to their wholesale order process. Before I started there, things were all done without any level of automation or systematization, literally building pallets of computer by hand, manually checking them for their specifications, testing them, and managing inventory.

To combat this inefficiency, I first went about working with two of my co-workers on fine-tuning the company's wholesale production processes and warehouse and workspace layout. After creating a series of build stations, we then went about building a robust, teamed, multi-gigabit private network to support twenty imaging stations. After this, we installed three FOG servers, built several custom PXE hosted tools, and created an extensive number of images and performance improvements to maximize imaging efficiency. This alone increased productivity and build times at least ten fold- no longer were we cloning hard drives, or reinstalling everything manually, but rather allowing the FOG system and our robust network create lightning fast imaging times... but I did not stop here.

Daedalus

Following this, I went about creating a software system called Daedalus. Daedalus had two major components, the first, a program written in Java, and the second, a web application build in PHP. The web application was installed on one of the imaging servers and allowed the creation, recall, and management of new wholesale orders, including warehouse storage mapping for better inventory management. It allowed the specification of product requirements on an order by order basis and tracked parts usages, failures, and production times in regards to the origins and vendor of any part or machine being worked on. This allowed the owner to track performance of our vendors and see trends in the quality of products we were sourcing.

The second part of Daedalus- the program, was installed on a series of test images hosted on the aforementioned PXE server. When one of these test images was rolled out, Daedalus would run automatically upon first start, and contact the web server. The web app allowed an option for automatic device enrollment, in which case Daedalus would check to ensure all computer specifications were correct. It would then stress test the drive health, I/O performance, CPU performance, GPU performance, and RAM performance and calculate based on the machine if there were any metrics pointing to an underlying product. If the device was not automatically enrolled, then the performance test logs would be displayed to the technician and then allow manual order assignment.

In addition to this, Daedalus also allowed us to improve out RMA handling by pulling serial numbers from the machine, the hard drive, the RAM, and additional parts and storing them within our on-site database. When a machine was returned, the serial number would instantly be looked up when Daedalus launched and instead of associating with an order, the known machine would run its current part numbers against what was in the database. This would instantly inform technicians working on RMAs if the machine had been tampered with or not. If it had not been tampered with, Daedalus would automatically run its performance tests again and attempt to make a suggestion on what issues it could find to the technician working on it.

I am very proud of the work that my coworkers and I accomplished at this business- turning it from a relatively small computer repair store into a massive multi warehouse operation. Unfortunately due to the COVID pandemic, this business is no longer in operation. I am currently working on re-writing Daedalus purely in C++ (and rewriting the web app) to release on this website as an open source project to assist independent repair shops with the management of their inventory, returns, and production processes; however, this is not a high priority item of my current work and as such does not get worked on much.
Update: Daedalus development is back in full swing and should be completed soon. This is now my #2 priority project, and has expanded to include a new Linux Distribution, but also a Node.JS app that will be packaged to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. More on this will come soon.

K-12 Technology Teaching (2020 - 2024)

COVID brought about a great many changes in my life, as it did everyone's. The largest of which personally, was suddenly becoming a technology teacher for grades 2^nd-12^th. I quickly discovered that teaching elementary school students was not a core competency for me, and as such such have in this time predominantly only taught grades six through twelve.

Teaching has been incredibly rewarding, and it has provided me with a myriad of opportunities to introduce children to some of the wonderful technologies that exist in our world. I have of course put a great deal of importance in teaching them security related concepts, especially practical ones; however, my primary focus has been to try to use technology to make the process of learning itself fun and exciting, regardless of the subject matter. I have plans to discuss many of my teaching styles and concepts in future blog posts.

Teaching has had an incredible impact on my life, and I would not trade my time in this role for anything. Unfortunately, due to the litany of issues that pervade education and the coming generation, I made the difficult decision to leave teaching (at least for the time being). I also plan to discuss this more in upcoming blog posts.

K-12 Administration (2015 - now)

I have spent a long time working in education now. As the primary IT person for a small school with a small budget, this has given me a myriad of fun challenges in bringing about affordable (often free) technology solutions for the organization I work for. The most impressive accomplishment I have from this is a tediously and above all else delicately constructed heterogeneous network comprised of twenty year old Cisco products, a few 2004 Dell Optiplex's running pfSense, Netgear managed products, Netgear unmanaged products, Ubiquity Edge products, and Ubiquity UniFi products. The fact that all of these devices have been coaxed into functioning with any degree of synergy is nothing short of a miracle... but the MDNS... oh how it mocks me.

Jokes aside, working in education has given me a great appreciation for the creativity it takes to implement usable technology solutions with little to no budget. So much of the contract work I have done has followed a Dr. John Hammond-esque mentality of sparing no expense.

Unfortunately, due to the litany of issues that pervades education, and the new coming generation, (something I have planned to discuss in an upcoming blog post), I look forward to leaving this sphere soon and moving on to newer and fresher things.

Conifer Frameworks (2020 - now)

Conifer Frameworks has been an unofficial DBA I have been using as of late for many personal projects I hope to release in the near future. Here are a few of the large ones:

• I am currently in the process of re-writing some of my Java projects I have made for past clients in C++ with the intention of releasing them as open source tools for the IT and wholesale computer refurbishing market.
• I am currently working on the development of a new computer language called Lapse. Lapse is a unique bytecode-compiled, interpreted language partial inspired by Java, and partially inspired by PERL. It will be released under the Apache2.0 License with cross platform compatibility upon release. The primary goal of this project is to abstract low level concepts to a higher level, removing the minutia involved in so many low level languages, while also providing options to those of us that wished more interpreted language options exist outside of the Python dominated hellscape that has become modern development.
• I have been working on a retro-themed pixel-art style fantasy-adventure video game trilogy written in C++ using the SDL graphics library. My goal is to create each game in as efficient a form as possible with a target of no more than 4 Megabytes per game.
• I am currently working on a series of web apps, many of which will be hosted on this website to assist programmers and developers in different ways. When some of these projects develop more I will bring more specifics to this section.
• I have been developing a social network for the last couple years in my free time designed around travel and adventure. It is one of the projects I am most looking forward to releasing one day! This social network is all about encouraging forming real-life groups and exploring new parts of the world together.
• In conjunction with a friend, I am currently in the process of developing a web application specifically designed to help car enthusiasts in their search of their dream car. More to come on this in early 2024.
• During COVID I assisted several companies with web-based task automation.
• The primary focus of my efforts as of late have been the creation of a series of marketing aggregate sites for two different clients.

I still offer IT services to different companies in the Charlotte, Monroe, Concord, and Gastonia, North Carolina. This is not really my primary area of concern any longer, as I am trying to transition more and more into development and move away from general IT support. In these areas, I offer companies assistance with task automation, (limited) custom software solutions, network design, implementation, & optimization, Linux server setup & customization, IT security consultations, virus & malware removal, hardware repairs, upgrades, & setup, and more!