Coming up on three years ago, I wrote "What is dotNetTemplar?" to explain the name a bit.  It briefly touches on why I chose to associate myself with the Knights Templar.  It doesn't really give an answer to who I am or what this blog is about.  After over three years of blogging here, I figure I should put up something to this effect.  I am writing this not in vanity but as a service for those few who may be curious about what and why I write on this blog.

A Bit of Personal History
I am Joshua David Ambrose Little, born just Joshua David Little.  Those who knew me prior to 2001 will doubtless have known me as Josh, except for those folks who knew me during college at Oral Roberts University, where I was known as Iain.  All these names deserve some explanation, and I'll get to that.  Born in Little Rock, AR, I moved to Tulsa, OK when I was almost three, and I grew up there, attending various public schools, but mostly Victory Christian School, of evangelical (charismatic) Protestant persuasion, from which I graduated in 1996.

On to University, or, My Life as Iain
I went across the street (literally) to Oral Roberts University the following fall.  I considered the University of Tulsa as well (had scholarships to both), but decided on ORU.  The choice came down to whether I intended to pursue engineering of some sort or something in liberal arts, and when I decided on liberal arts, I decided on ORU.¹

As I waited in the registration line at ORU, I pondered what major to go with, and when I reached the front of the queue, on the spur of the moment, I declared history to be my major.  A day or so later, still during orientation, I realized just how many Joshes there were at ORU, and decided to choose a nickname to go by so I didn't have to look over my shoulder every 15 minutes when someone yelled "Josh."

I decided to go with Iain because I was still in my Scottish phase at the time, and recently a well-known piper and member of the Scottish Club of Tulsa (SCOT), Iain MacPherson, had passed away.  Going to college seemed like a good time to make the change.  Thus I became Iain Little to folks at ORU.

Iain remained only a nickname, and sometime during my senior year, I decided that I would ditch it after I graduated.  So when I went to work for InfoTech in Tampa², during the summer of '98, I went back to Josh.  InfoTech was the first software job I got by just saying "give me a couple weeks and see if I catch on"; it was my first real foray into professional software development, even if it was in a rare language/platform called PROGRESS.  [Of course, I, like many in our industry, had toyed with computers and software since I got my Commodore 64 as a lad, but this was the first real software job I took on.]

So I was  Josh at home and at work, but still Iain at school (it would've been too much trouble to change that for the last year).  I was on track towards becoming a professor when I got married in May of '99.  That summer, I attended a Pew Younger Scholars Program at Notre Dame, which was a three-week graduate seminar, and it was there, after many long phone convos with my new wife, that I determined that professional history was probably not the best choice for me.  I found it to be a little too tedious for my tastes; you pore over sources for years just to argue the case that X is true.

Beguiled by Software, or, The dotNet in dotNetTemplar
With renewed interest in computers and software, I started researching what the best path would be.  I pretty much knew it wouldn't be PROGRESS, and at the time, it seemed that Visual Basic was the hottest thing out there.  After buying NT 4.0 and VB 6 at the university store (thank God for academic pricing!), I dug in that summer, and in October of '99, I applied to Fireant (later to be known as XOR) for work. 

They asked me if I knew what ASP was, and I had no clue, nor did I know what SQL was, but I told them to give me a chance.  After a technical screening just to make sure I knew basic programming concepts, they let me on for a probationary period.  Thankfully, ASP and SQL were super easy to pick up (at least well enough during those heady days of the dotcom boom), so after two weeks, we came to an agreement, and I started with them officially.

I went full-time there (as Josh) before graduating in 2000, and that launched me onto the career path I'm in now.  Since then, I've had the good fortune to work at numerous companies: BOK Financial, Verizon, GTE Federal Credit Union, ASPSOFT (for angryCoder), BST Global, and now, happily, for Infragistics.  In the meantime, I've written a few technical books, many technical articles, spoken at numerous technical events, and I am honored to have been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for six consecutive years.  I keep track of my professional details on my MVP Profile, in case anyone's curious. :)  Also, feel free to connect³ if you like.

So that's where the "dotNet" in "dotNetTemplar" comes in.  I'm something of an expert in Microsoft's .NET technologies (picked it up in 2001 and haven't looked back!), and a portion of what I blog about here is technical, usually related to .NET, though these days I tend to be a bit more architectural in my blogging than technology-specific.

Beguiled by Truth, or, The Templar in dotNetTemplar
But that's only the half of it.  Where does the "Templar" bit come in?  I already alluded to a post I wrote a few years ago on that, but there's more to it.  As I commented recently in reference to why I joined the Lay Fraternity of the Dominican Order, I have been enamored of truth for a long time.

As a result of my pursuit of truth, I ended up joining the Roman Catholic Church on Easter Vigil 2001, at which point I took the confirmation name of Ambrose, after St. Ambrose of Milan, a 4th century bishop, Father, and Doctor (formally-recognized great teacher) of the Church.  There were many things that drew me to St. Ambrose.  Mostly, it was his love of learning (he is the patron saint of learning) and his tenacity for truth--in his writings and in resisting the Arians and great political powers of his age, but also his love for life⁴ and for the poor.  In short, I consider myself a man after his own heart, and of all the saints, I feel inexplicably close to him, and that's why I took his name.

My conversion to the Catholic Faith was significant enough to me that I decided to not simply take Ambrose as a confirmation name that is only used at the confirmation ceremony.  My conversion was the result of a long wrestling with truth, even a wrestling with God in a sense.  Because of my upbringing, I was unconsciously suspicious of and prejudiced against Catholicism (though not outright anti-Catholic), so it took a while for both me and my wife to come around to joining the Church.  Even though I overcame my intellectual objections earlier, we didn't feel comfortable becoming Catholic until 2001 (after a few years of being Episcopalian).

So like Jacob wrestled with God and received the name Israel, I had wrestled with God and received the name Ambrose at my confirmation and reception into the Catholic Church.  To mark the significance of this event, I took on the name legally, choosing to go by it going forward, and anyone who didn't already know me as Josh or Iain now knows me as J. Ambrose Little (but just "Ambrose" in person).  I hope to at least faintly do honor to that great name.

As I hope is obvious, my faith is a fundamental part of my life.  And that's where the "Templar" part of dotNetTemplar comes in.  This blog is a blend of my musings on software and technology as well as my philosophical, theological, historical, and general thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. 

What can I say?  It's a personal blog; it's dotNetTemplar; it's who I am and what I care about.

What Do You Care About?

Everything [Subscribe] - Of course, I'd love for you to subscribe to all of my mental meanderings!

That said, out of consideration for those who may only be interested in one half of the dotNetTemplar, I set up two basic categories for you:

• Technical [Subscribe] - For my technical/software-related musings.
• Non-Technical [Subscribe] - For everything else.

There are more focused categories, but since this is the basic divide of topics on this blog, I thought I'd make it easy on folks.

Notes
1. I also had a better scholarship and had more friends going to ORU. :)
2. My mom had moved to Tampa at the end of the summer of '97.  I like to say I went to college, and my parents went away, since it's more usual that one goes away from parents to college. :)
3. LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, MySpace, and last but not least, Live Spaces.  Phwew! 
4. Pope John Paul the Great quoted Ambrose's argument against capital punishment in JP's encyclical Evangelium Vitae (Gospel of Life).  For me, that was the most compelling argument against it, and what else I've read of Ambrose has a similar clarity, earthiness, and vitality.