About Visual Core

I originally created VisualCore.com in Feb. 1999 as a project for a web design class. I packed it full of sample code for VisualBasic 3,4 and 5 that I found around the web. Since then, there have been about seven major graphical overhauls, and has been badly neglected from time to time. Today, it is my personal site where I host my code and random bits of junk I feel applicable.

About Me

I am Jeremy Cowles, a programmer and computer science student in the San Francisco bay area. My wife and I moved here in 2007 and I am currently enrolled in the UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) program, with a focus on software.

In addition to my studies, I am also working to implement OOP in Berkeley Logo as part of an undergraduate research program through the university. Logo is a programming language specialized for children, originally developed by Seymour Papert in the 1960's at MIT. Berkeley Logo is maintained by Brian Harvey and developed by students like myself. I am also interested in large-scale distributed systems and parallel processing. In the future, I hope to be able to contribute to an energy project and develop an enjoyable game.

I have been programming since my family first got a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer II (lovingly, the Trash-80), which ran a crippled version of BASIC. After the TRS-80 came the IBM PS/2 286 and MS/GW BASIC. After the 286 we jumped up to a Packard-Bell 486 DX (33 MHz with a turbo button!). This was my first experience with Windows 3.1, AOL and the Internet. I spent most of my time on AOL, chatting and writing VB 3.0 apps to *automate* AOL, for those long and boring tasks like sending thousands of IM messages to a friend, or sharing my list of mail in my inbox *ahem*.

After the 486 was no longer tollerable, I built my first computer: an Intel Pentium (120 MHz, by Cyrix), and started dabbeling in VB 4.0. I proceeded to build all my computers from this point on (with the exception of the one I'm working on now, which my friend built), and my work with VB continued as well in 5.0, 6.0, .NET 2002, .NET 2003 and most recently VB.NET 2005.

I have worked professionally for about 9 years. My first "computer" job was in the DataFlex configuration department, where I swapped countless AST motherboards. After that, I was co-owner of a small startup that specialized in generating searchable text databases and search scripts in Perl. After the demise of that dream, I started working in ASP classic for USMerchant.com, which turned out to be the prototypical 1999 internet dream company and was subsequently bought out by a company in Omaha Nebraska. I was sold as part of the buyout, and spent a month in Omaha writing a software load balancer in VB 6(!) and a DLL that linked their AS400/VISA network into ASP classic (the USMerchant code).

After USMerchant, I spent a year working contracts and various small jobs, and then got my first "real" job as a systems engineer for Kewill Systems, writing VB 6 and ASP Classic code for shipping and warehouse systems. This is where I met my amazing wife, Aimée, who was also a systems engineer. And the rest, as they say, was history.