I’m a Senior Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience in the business. I started out working for the military writing programs that would try and find tanks hiding in satellite and radar imagery. After two years of this work, I made the move to the civilian sector and took a position working on large e-commerce websites with a dot.com company. When the dot.com bubble burst, I transitioned into being an independent contractor and consultant. I worked successfully on a wide variety of projects but, eventually, I found being an independent contractor limiting because I wanted to be able to bring a whole team to bear solving customer’s problems. This realization led to my founding Reliant with my partner, Joe Russo.
I have spent most of the last 5 years working as a software architect as well as programmer. I have worked on projects where the customer wanted to add features or improve performance to a legacy application while making the minimum changes to source code. In this capacity I have worked on MS ACCESS, ASP 3.0, PHP, PERL, VB6, and Delphi systems. Usually the customer is concerned about making the minimum investment to an older code base that they will replace in a few years and don’t want to change an architecture which their in house development staff understands. These projects have sometimes required me to spend time training company resources as to what changes were made and why.
Like most architects/programmers, I usually prefer projects where I am responsible for the entire software development cycle and get to design the application from scratch. I actually enjoy the challenge of interacting with customers and trying to refine their needs into clear requirements When client requirements allow me freedom, I design most projects as N-Tier applications and implement them using C# for the DAL and Business layers. The majority of presentation layers I have written have been implemented using ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 with AJAX used to enrich the user’s experience.
Many smaller clients don't have dedicated DBA's and I have often taken on that role. Wearing that hat I have designed and built relational databases that had to handle thousands of transactions a second. Most of my experience is in various flavors of Microsoft SQL server but I have worked with MySQL, FoxPro, MS Access, and (very limited experience) Oracle 9. My duties have included writing complex queries that necessitated correlated subqueries combined with user defined functions. I have defined and implemented backup and maintenance plans which maintain data integrity and allow the customer to recover from catastrophic failures. Another large facet of my work in the DBA arena has been data migration work. Many of my projects have involved significant schema changes to a client’s database and I’ve had to write the code and queries which would translate their legacy data from the old schema to the new. This migration code would often have to de-dupe, clean, and normalize the old data before it was inserted into the new database.