Does Alder have a first or last name?

Hi there! I’m Alder Locke, a software developer / analyst with a passion for technology.

The Olden Days

I started programming when I was about 9-years old. Over the years, I’ve dabbled with all sorts of technologies and languages. I remember when ansi.sys unlocked the most epic of “user interface” features – like a handful of colors and carefully-constructed boxes. Before Windows had a “start” button, there was Borland and I learned to love the iconic blue background of my Pascal IDE. C and C++ were offered as classes in high-school and the whole object-oriented paradigm seemed like the breakthrough way of the future.

I had an opportunity to work in a computer shop as a high school internship. Silicon Mountain Technologies (a play on Silicon Valley because we were in the mountains of Western Montana) gave me a taste for building and repairing custom PCs. I mean who didn’t love the 486 DX4, 100 MHz am I right?! This internship allowed me to build and practice my troubleshooting and customer service skills which have continued to serve me since.

In the late 1990’s I discovered a love for this thing called the web. Through the early aughts, Kopavi Systems Inc was my first job as a professional developer as opposed to the freelance work I had been doing. I spent several years hacking together pretty amazing web applications with tables and spacer gifs before CSS changed the front-end development world. I call these applications rather than sites because these applications hooked into a web server for functionality beyond the browser. Classic ASP with VBScript, and ADO with recordsets, and even a LAMP excursion oh my!

At the Montana Department of Justice I was responsible for maintaining the department website and developing web applications. I built an early version of the State’s Sexual and Violent Offender Registry. I supported the Montana Highway Patrol with various applications and in-car hardware deployments. With the release of the .NET Framework, I found myself going back to my C-based language roots and building a Windows Application using C# to support constituents end-of-life decisions. Another large .NET implementation was the system supporting the state’s Motor Vehicle System.

Having gained Motor Vehicle System experience in Montana, I accepted a position with SAIC where I first played the role of a Business Systems Analyst and later as a Software Engineer supporting the development and customization of Motor Vehicle Systems for Connecticut and Kentucky. It can be humbling to be tasked with implementing the specification you wrote as an analyst.

’ OR 1=1 –

I have a distinct memory of an influential moment early in my career when I was engaged in a conversation with a consultant trainer who made an off-handed comment about input sanitization and SQL injection. His role was to conduct training on a different topic, but this comment and my subsequent research opened my eyes to the topic of application security.

This was a pivotal moment for me and I realized that a significant amount of code I had worked with over the years was potentially vulnerable to motivated attackers. I found the idea of application vulnerability analysis and secure coding practices enticing enough that I went back to school. I obtained my B.S. in IT - Security from Western Governors University.

Fast Forward

In 2012 I joined Multnomah County (think Portland, Oregon) as a Senior Development Analyst supporting the Department of Community Justice (DCJ). Contrary to the stereotypical dodgy government office, the County has modern development practices. This was my first professional experience with Agile development which proved to be a natural fit for a software developer.

The County provided my first opportunity to develop rich interactive JavaScript client applications. This started as KnockoutJS data binding and evolved into Angular single page applications. I gained experience with TypeScript and a number of JavaScript task automation runners to build and bundle client-side resources for a CI/CD pipeline.

In 2019 I moved from supporting DCJ to supporting the Sheriff’s Department (MCSO). This team’s portfolio includes applications developed with a variety of technologies including Blazor.

This Blog

I’ve created this blog as a brain dump for myself. I hope that in the future this will allow me to quickly find and refer to today’s solutions for tomorrow’s challenges. If you should find anything here of use, or want to let me know about something awesome – let me know.

Awards, Certification, and Recognition