About TR-Systems
This web site came about while I was migrating my HA system from Vera to Hubitat in January of 2024 and developing the device driver I would need for my Hikvision cameras, which I intended from the start to be something useful and previously unavailable that I could release to the world on the Hubitat Community Forum. That would be a first for me. As is publishing this web site.
I wanted to provide a User Guide to go with my driver so I started looking for the best way to do that and this is what I came up with, after a Developer on the Forum pointed me in this direction. Github Pages from a private repository with a low cost Team account and a custom domain name that was exactly what I wanted, too.
In only a day, dummies book at my side, I was up and running with my TR-Systems web site, having no prior experience wtih Github until I started this project and found out I needed to use it for deployment of my driver to the Hubitat Community.
Ah, but I needed to give it some style, so with a few more weeks of home schooling, study and testing, I learned how to copy and customize one of the supported GitHub themes to get what you see here. The theme I chose is Modernist, which suits me well. I’m calling my version, Lakeside Blues.
So now, I not only have a cool way to publish the User Guide and provide a link to it in my device driver, but I can also use this to share some of the other groovy gadgets I’ve come up with in recent years.
About the Author
I am a retired IT professional. I got my start in “data processing” in 1975 at age 19 when I was offered a position as a “data technician” while working in the mail room and print shop for a small pension and benefits consulting company in Lake Bluff IL that I started at shortly after high school. I have been “coding for fun and profit” ever since.
I wrote my first and only game using Basic on a Burroughs 3800 mainframe in 78/79 while working as the 2nd shift Computer Operator at the local JC I was attending (feeding punch cards into the machine to run student programs (cobol, fortran, rpg) and running batch jobs for the college). The game was a “seek and destroy” Star Trek game that had several hundred lines of code, all keyed in on a CRT terminal and then played on a CRT terminal, with the code printed on green bar of course.
Click here for a look back in time, and play Star Trek ‘79!
From there, I got married, had kids and spent the 80s back at the consulting company as a COBOL programmer and then a MVS/CICS OS programmer. That’s when I started coding in Assembler. I still have my IBM System/370 Principles of Operation tucked away should I ever need it again.
After a change in companies in 88, still an mvs/cics os programmer but now working for big pharma, I got in on the ground floor of the Internet and Email systems in 93. For the next 22 years, large multi-platform corporate email and directory systems infrastructure, connectivity, migrations and application interfaces became and was my specialty. I retired in 2015, shortly after the company decided to move it all to the cloud. Although my job was secure (many others were to lose theirs), I’d had enough of those mega migration projects, and my goal had always been to retire early.
So after 35 years in the corporate cubicle, the last two of which were spent telecommuting from my studio apartment in San Luis Obispo, the next 8 years were spent living my California dream and pursuing other passions.
I am now back home where it all started, doing something I’ve always enjoyed, which is LEARNING NEW THINGS and coming up with unique solutions to unique problems.
Thanks for stopping by.