My Story

Here is my story as a developer. I started out playing on Commodore 64 in elementary school. I would have to give a lot of credit to the Librarian at Valleyview Public School. He had allowed me to work with him, set up computers and actually spend time on the computers.

In high school I took a computer class that I learned on IBM XT computers. These were big and old computers. Mind you this was in the early 90’s. Once I had saved up enough cash of my own, I purchased an old Tandy with a green monitor, no hard drive and two very large floppy drives ( notice there was no mention of a full color monitor or CD Rom ). I used this computer to write programs and connect to bulletin boards using a very old modem. Mom and dad would pick up the phone and hear the traditional squelch of bits and bytes being transferred over their phone lines. My favorite program to write was a gold coin program from the byte magazine. You had to purchase the magazine monthly to get the next part of the program ( I don’t think I had ever finished it ).

In college I purchased my first real computer ( windows 3.1 ) in my second year. Up until then I had done all of my homework in the computer labs. There really wasn’t much of the internet in 1994, 1995, 1996 when I was in college. The best we had was chat rooms and email programs. I had to connect using Trumpet Winsock and Netscape. Ah those were the days! College taught me C, Pascal and Cobol programming. It was very heavy in business, marketing and accounting. I graduated in 1996.

My first job was factory automation ( basically robotics ). I integrated Visual Basic with Allen Bradley PLCs. I provided a user interface, scheduling app to control machines larger than most houses. It was a blast and I was able to travel North America.

Upon reflection, I did have a cool job to mention that happened just before what I declared as my first job. I had done Visual Cobol for 3 months. Yes – I used Visual and Cobol in the same sentence.

From all of this some how I ended up writing Customs Brokerage software in Classic ASP and ultimately in DotNet. I integrated to all kinds of devices ( windows CE, scanners, printers and fax machines ) and secured networks like Canadian Customs.

I operated my own company for many years before I sold my shares. We were profitable, global and very unique. My company was operated with a partner and we catered to Caribbean Islands who used AS400 systems for billing purposes. We rocked this. To this day the company continues to be successful by the parties who bought me out.

Over the years I have taught myself PHP, ASP, Java, DotNet, Python and more. I do not believe there is anything that I cannot learn. Give me a week or two and I am likely to be proficient enough to be successful. I like learning and I do not allow there to be limitations. I could never be where I am today without support of all my bosses, family and friends who believed in me and continue to challenge me. Challenges only drive me harder.

I have worked for many awesome companies both as an employee and contractor. Some jobs I was better at than others, but all were successful. Some companies I worked at more than once, some offered me a job again years later. All companies were awesome and I appreciated all the opportunities they gave me.

I have worked as a

• Software Developer
• Web Developer
• Database Developer
• Project Manager
• Developer Manager
• IT Manager
• Needs Analyst
• User Support

Want to be part of my story? Let’s talk… I would love for us to be successful together. Even if I do not know your technology or platform, I can and would be willing to learn it. Everything can be learned. I bring to the table street smarts, practical business processes, flexibility and an analytical mind. My story is ready for a new chapter.