Photo of my daughter Skylar and son Phillip:

I'm a proud husband to my wife Karyn and father of a precious baby girl Skylar and an adorable little boy named Phillip. I enjoy spending as much time as I can with my family and treasure every moment we have together. I love spending time at the lake skiing, wakeboarding, surfing, hotdogging, etc. In the winter I like to travel to Colorodo to snowboard. Other hobbies include soccer, hiking, and road trips.

About the Technical Me

I am a quick learner and am currently studying some new front-end languages like React, Vue and Angular. Once I am proficient in those, I plan to work on WordPress.

August 2011 to Present: I have been working as a Web Developer at Compusystems building trade show registration websites. Some languages I use there are Java/JSP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, iText, eScript, UNIX, and SQL.

December 2010 to August 2011: I reamped my marketing campaign for freelance clients and started to build my online portfolio by doing projects in the software technologies and languages that I neglected by working at Eagle Creek Software Services. I find each and every project that I do is building up my experience, refining my abilities, and keeps me from going out of date with technology. I went to college to build more efficient computer applications that better suit their users, which I am definately putting to use now. However, I want to harness my abilities on a corporate scale.

February 2010 to December 2010: I worked at Eagle Creek Software Services as a CRM Consultant doing Siebel configuration. I was placed on a 10 person team in Pierre, South Dakota. My team was responsible for resolving issues that were found through failed test scripts of a composite of test case. We were nicknamed the "batting cage" or "batting clean-up team," because our role was to knock the issues out of the park prior to releasing them to the end users and/or client. As you may imagine, my role was high pressured due to tight 1-2 week deadlines with only 3-6 days to iron out all the kinks to each of the issues. Some people do not enjoy a lot of pressure, but I learned to think quickly and learn on the fly. These were great characteristics that are making me stronger each and everyday. As I left South Dakota, I looked back on the position and found that prior to starting this position, I knew nothing about Oracle or South Dakota, but I left with fantastic knowledge of both.

June 2009 to February 2010: I was on the search for a full-time position with a solid full-lifecycle understanding of how a company internally and externally works, interaction with larger scale clients, and corporate exposure. My second goal was to start marketing and landing freelance clients. I was successful with landing clients, but wanted to go a step further by refining my homepage to allow for client forms (i.e. consent, authorization, and work forms) to be automated through web forms and send the text based forms to my web site request email address. Using web forms allowed clients remote access to forms without my assistance and allowed them to fill out required forms on their own timeframe without having to remember where they saved all the forms. Third, I began weekly updates and adding little components to my homepage to add little finesse and shows what I am able to provide to clients.

August 2005- June 2009: I attended DePaul University in Chicago, IL to earn my Bachelors of Science degree in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction). HCI recently switched to IM (Interactive Media). Since the summer of 2000, I had grown attached to programming and designing web-based sites. I wanted to better understand what and why people think a certain way. I felt this was difficult to find by reading through a book or listening to a lecture. Since 2009, I have been enjoying creating freelance web sites for local and family owned companies. In 2009, I set out to find a name for myself in the corporate world in a web development role as well as keeping my options open to Data Management. With this being said, I have been looking for a full-time corporate position in any of three areas data, web development, and customer relationship management.

How Do I Stay Up-To-Date?

Furthering My Education:

I am pursing my Master of Science degree at DePaul University in Information Systems. I am looking to concentrate in Business Web Analysis and Development, Database Administration or Business Analysis/Systems Analysis. I am also job searching for a corporate postion during my free time.

Aptitude Tests:

I take online aptitude test frequently at www.brainbench.com.
What I believe I will retain from the aptitude tests are...
1. The tests provides me with a 3 year certifications that says "Blake Bassett has what it takes to program in the specific technologies & languages."
2. The tests build my confidence in what I have learned in the past.
3. The tests guide me into learning more than what I have learned in the past.
4. The tests teaches me from my mistakes and solidates what know.

Refresher Projects:

Perfoming updates and maintence to my personal homepage with components that I could never dream of building through academics. Every little thing helps to put me ahead of the competition.

Positive Daily Outlook:

I look to learn something new each and everyday. There is no such answer as knowing too much or to little as long as you do not forget your past.
I stay positive on who I am and what I know. My theory is...

I went through 10+ years of technical academic courses and 6+ years of technical freelance work to be where I am.

In fact, you could take all that experience away, and I would still be happy of where I am. I have never earned anything without working hard at accomplishing the task. While being relentless on learning and improving on what I do not know and retaining what I do.

By keeping a smile on my face; I found bad situation and bad days turning upside down. I keep a smile goes miles and makes the most angry people happy.

My Technical Experience...

Current Certifications

The languages that I have learned are...

Client-Side Scripting Languages
- HTML
- XHTML
- HTML5
- CSS
- JavaScript
- JQuery
- eScript
- XML
Interactive Scripting Languages

ActionScript 2
ActionScript 3

Server-Side Scripting Languages

ASP
ASP.NET
- C#
- VB.NET
Java
JSP

Database Query Language

DML
DDL
Dynamic SQL (Aquiring)
Miscellaneous SQL (Aquiring)

Assembly Languages

UNIX
SOAP (Aquiring)
Command Prompt

The RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems) databases that I have learned are...

Oracle - Siebel
Access (.mdb) (.accdb) (.db2)

EMAS (DePaul University Database)