Jerry Wayne Odom Jr

• 1 pound fresh shrimp
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon red pepper
• 2 cup of water
• 2 tablespoons cooking oil
• 3 tablespoons all purpose flour
• 1 onion minced
• 1/2 clove garlic minced
• 1/2 can of whole tomatoes chopped
• 1 cup water
• pinch of nutmeg
• 6 boiled eggs halved

Boil shrimp in salted water 5 minutes.   Let cool in broth and drain liquid in to seperate container to keep.    In a heavy pot make roux.   Add onions and garlic and cook 3-4 minutes.   Add tomatoes, water, nutmeg and shrimp broth; cook over medium heat about 15 minutes.   Add shrimp and cook on simmering heat for 1-2 hours.   Salt and pepper again.   Serve over rice and garnish with eggs.

• 1/3 cup oil
• 1/2 cup flour
• 2 cups minced onions
• 1 cup minced green pepper
• 1/2 cup minced celery
• 8 ounce can tomato sauce
• 2 pounds cleaned shrimp
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup water
• 1.5 tablespoons chopped parsley
• 1.5 tablespoons chopped green onions
• hot cooked rice

Make a golden brown roux of oil and flour.   Add onion, green pepper and cellery;  cook slowly until clear, stirring often.   Add tomato sauce and cook covered over low heat for 20 minutes.   Add shrimp, salt, black and red pepper.   If mixture becomes dry add 1/4 to 1/2 cup of water.   Cook 10 to 15 minutes longer or until shrimp turn pink.   When ready to serve, stir in parsley and onion tops.   Serve on rice.   Makes 4 servings.

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup oil
• 2 large onions chopped
• 1 cup celery chopped
• 1 bunch green onions chopped
• 1 gallon water
• 1/2 cup parsley chopped
• 2 lbs shrimp
• 1 lb crabmeat
• 1 pint oysters
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• salt and pepper

In a gumbo pot mix oil and flour to make a roux.   Add onions, celery and saute well.   Stir in green onions.   Add 1 gallon of water and boil slowly for one hour.   Add parsley and shrimp; cook for 20 minutes on a low fire.   Add crab meat and oysters.    Add salt and pepper to taste.   Server over rice.   If okra gumbo is desired, cook down cut up okra until it is not slimy.   Add to gumbo during the boiling period.

• 3 lbs shrimp peeled
• 1 lb crabmeat
• 1 dozen oysters
• 1 lb sliced smoked sausage
• 3 cups rice
• 1 small can tomato sauce
• 1 large onion chopped
• 2/3 cup parsley chopped
• 2/3 cup shallots chopped
• 2/3 cup bell pepper chopped
• 2/3 cup cooking oil

Boil rice and set aside.   Saute onion over medium-low heat in oil until almost brown.   Add shrimp and cook 15 minutes stirring occasionally.   Add parsley, shallots and bell pepper; saute 10 minutes, stirring.   Add smoked sausage and cook for 10 minutes.   Add 3 cups water and cook 1/2 hour over medium heat.   Add oysters and crabmeat; cook 15 minutes and season to taste.    Add rice a little at a time, steadily stirring, until all rice is in.   Heat over medium heat for 15 minutes stirring occasionally.   Serves 6 to 8 people.

A roux is needed for many Cajun and French dishes like gumbo, sauce piquante and stew.    A roux is a mixture of oil and flour browned slowly to a deep golden brown.   Put oil in a heavy pan with a temperature of low to medium heat.   Stir in the amount of flour called for in the recipe.   Stir and stir almost constantly to prevent burning until the mixture becomes golden or deep brown.   A good roux takes 15 to 30 minutres to make.   Now add chopped onions and cook until clear.    Take your time and you’ll get it right.

I realized a few years back that unless I wanted to be only a software developer for the rest of my life I needed to grow professionally beyond just staying latest and greatest in software development. Lately I’ve been noticing a number of my peers having decades more experience and still basically doing the same job. There’s nothing against that as it’s a high pay, low stress profession that allows you to solve new problems every day. However I got in to software development because I enjoy the challenges but my time working with others who are more experienced made me realize that eventually it’s all the same thing even with the business problems you have to address.   I’ve thought of earning an MBA(still am thinking) but something came upon me that allowed an opportunity to grow right now.

To me it seemed if I really want to take it to the next level then I’ll need to move in to project management or architecture and I was lucky enough to move in to the project management sort of role around a year ago. Being double lucky they’ve enrolled me through the Business Project Management Program at LSU and for me it’s really added so much perspective in my day to day as a software developer let alone my growth as a Project Manager.  The courses are designed to develop you in project management as defined by the Project Management Institute which is “the” organization for the promotion of project management as a profession.  Essentially if you learn to manage a project their way you can manage a project anywhere for any business sense.  But that aside I have to say that as a developer you gain so much more insight on goals and objectives within an organizational structure.   Things that previously made no sense about why certain things were being done become clear or you at least understand the possible reasons your enterprise might be doing what they’re doing.

To me becoming skilled as a project manager is also exciting because not only can I manage IT and software development projects but I can also manage any project in any business beyond IT with their framework.   By pursuing this extension of my skillset in to this field I’ve given myself a world of new possible opportunity where I was presently pretty much set on being a developer.   You might think “Does this mean you’re thinking of leaving software development?” and the answer is no but options for consideration are nice to have.   I love developing software but I’ve had friends talk about their fields and thought it’d be exciting to work in that direction.   As a skilled project manager you have a niche that allows you to move across industry beyond a certain functional area.(IT)

As I said the program at LSU allows you to learn as it relates to the PMI but it also bridges gaps between yourself and other professionals.   For instance in the construction business you have planners & estimaters who consider many of us software developers so alien we might as well be from Mars.    However when they saw PMP study guides and material in regards to Project Management they instantly had something to talk about from their perspective.   On the other hand I found myself better capable of discussing software development with them.  So instantly this was positive and showing to be a worthwhile investment.   Further in later discussions

I’ve recently been doing a lot of Silverlight development at work.   Silverlight is great for rapidly produce some very useful applications that meet a lot of challenges we couldn’t solve well with ASP.NET or WinForms in the past.   It’s like the best of both worlds in that you can develop WinForms like applications and deliver them over the Internet.  Well suddenly it recently became an issue that we needed to run these apps on an Ipad.   Sales and executives wanted to be able to show and this was a risk we never thought of in planning so it was a big uh oh.   I don’t know much about Ipad and research showed that Apple is big time anti-plugin due to their love for HTML 5 and standards in general.   So I’ve been falsly reporting for a month now that you can’t get these applications to run on an Ipad.

Why is it false?   Well one of our guys not to be deterred opened a ticket with our network squad.  Now technically you can’t install and run Silverlight in any fashion on an Ipad at the moment.   However one of our Citrix gurus quickly realized that this was not true and we could get the app running through the XenDesktop. Here is a link to an article where people are discussing it. I was pleasently happy to be wrong as I had began scheduling to have one of our developers ramp up on estimating how long it would take to replace the Silverlight interface with an ASP.NET interface. Our applications are service based so it wouldn’t have been a huge deal however I’ll take no additional hassle any day of the week.

Sometimes it’s good to be wrong.

We’re getting to be around 16 months now. All kinds of energy!

Beautiful weather this February in Baton Rouge so we’ve hit the parks a lot lately. She’s also learned how to use just about anything as a stool or just stand on tables for no reason.

New website segment I”m trying to do where I post some pics of Ella every month.