Mike Crooks

I've been working with javascript since the first version in Netscape 2 (1995) in the days when it was called "Dynamic HTML" - before the libraries and frameworks existed. A good grounding in the fundamentals (HTML, Javascript, CSS) goes a long way to help understand where to solve a problem. In more recent times (last 7 years) most of the web projects I've been involved in are framework based - usually Angular or Salesforce Lightning.

I first started building high performance back-end solutions in Java back in 1996 during a large-scale migration of a "C" based solution for parsing and interpreting languages. In one project, I used Java to build a full compiler for a declarative-based high-level language that concurrently generated native source code/fully functional solutions for native Android apps (Java based) and iOS apps (Objective-C based). I still use Java today to deliver machine learning solutions that have unusual requirements or require high speed / high volume predictions. I also currently deliver solutions in some of the Java derivatives like the language used in the Salesforce platform: Salesforce Apex.

Although I was involved in building machine learning solutions back in the early 90's (back then they were often called "expert systems"), I am only listing my recent history here (I got back into deep involvement in machine learning projects in 2015). An important part of machine learning is the data wrangling before the training the AI and Python + Pandas is very useful for "wrangling" the data. My current active AI projects are often combination of Python and Java for training the AI model and Java for high speed/high volume predictions after the AI model is deployed.

Over the years, I have needed to interface to a lot of different databases both relational and non-relational - ranging from now outdated vendor solutions like Informix, Sybase, Unify, Ingres, IDM, DB2, Allbase, Image, RDB, RMS and many many others. More recently, it has mainly been to Oracle, MySQL and Salesforce SOQL.