People are my passion. Behind all successful software projects are people who love technology, love collaboration and constantly pursue the answer to, "What if?". I love team building...mixing talent, personalities and a healthy dose of fun to produce results.

The past seven years with the State of Iowa has centered around building one of the best development teams I've ever been associated with. Together we have delivered a number critical software solutions to the citizens of Iowa including the Iowa Sex Offender Registry, Iowa School Alerts and Iowa Health Facilities Database.

• Collaborated on projects in nearly every agency in state government with hands on experience with professional licensing, farm subsidies, managing foster care children, social and charitable gambling licenses, state funded college aid and more.
• Architected solutions in Java and .NET and helped in introducing PHP as our core competency. My architecture work included introducing frameworks for each of our platforms which, together with our repeatable SDLC process, helped us commoditize software delivery.
• Gave a number of talks at industry conferences, local tradeshows, Iowa colleges and in state government on a variety of topics such as PHP, design patterns, UML, web security and project management. I was also one of the most vocal advocates of using open source software within the state.
• Grew the development team from just over a half dozen developers to over 30. As a "team builder" I was responsible for finding contract and full time employees, helping to develop their talent and get them ready for the next steps in their career.
• Managed the state's Java-based electronic payment system that was integrated into a number of state systems which together collect millions of dollars for our customer agencies. This experience includes becoming compliant with the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS).
• Helped to introduce Enterprise A&A, a centralized, service-based authentication and authorization system that could be integrated into any of our systems regardless of technology. This solution supported both single credential sets and Single Sign-on and was engineered to serve as the foundation of an identify management system.
• Helped to introduce a repeatable software development and project management lifecycle which resulted in the establishment of a project management competency.

My passion for software simply can't be contained to "normal working hours". I've spent nearly eleven years providing consulting expertise to a wide range of companies and organizations. The highlight of my independent work was being hired at both BusinessSolver and the State of Iowa after first serving in this capacity.

• Developed an online store front for a small desktop software vendor. This allowed my client to sell their suite of educational tools online to students, high schools and universities.
• Helped a Des Moines-based retail store improve their IT infrastructure by introducing the use of Linux-based thin clients, a Linux-based network complete with a firewall and network monitoring and by helping them define their business requirements for an inventory management system so they could make a decision on a commercial system to purchase.
• Developer for one of Compaq's enterprise web applications that allowed up to 700 customer service representatives to help customers, place and track an order and give inventory information on parts. Unique during this time (1999) was the use of Javascript which is very much like today's Ajax technology. Other components of the system were Active Server Pages (ASP), XML, DHTML, COM, MTS, MSMQ, IBM MQSeries, Internet Explorer, and used MS SQL Server 7 and DB2 for backends

Businessolver was my first exposure to life inside of a start-up. Originally hired as an independent consultant I helped this fledgling start-up by building a small, close-knit IT team that served everything from basic system adminstration to management of their website offering insurance-based products and value-added services.

• Helped the organization sever the relationship with their IT vendor and brought all hardware in-house and hired networking, database and programming staff to run the website. The successful completion of this project saved the company over $100,000 in monthly expenditures.
• Developed the Enrollment and Eligibility system was envisioned to be the company's core service offering. This allowed companies to handle new and annual insurance enrollment online where, once entered, we would convert to the required format of the insurance carriers.
• I was promoted to Directory of Technology where I was responsible for managing a tight $400,000 annual IT budget. This required leveraging the maturity of open source technologies which included migrating from Solaris to Linux, migrating to the Resin Java application server and implementing IP tables and Squid for firewalls and proxies respectively.

Worked for an unusual tech start-up, Tenant Pilot, which provided online property management software aimed at large apartment complexes. What made this start-up unusual for me is I was specifically hired to work on cattle management software for the VC which was part of their funding arrangement.

• The VC ran the third largest cattle herd in the U.S. and had a desktop system built over seven years that managed his herd and he wanted to port it to the web. This was a technically challenging tasks as the system was built as a windows application using an outdated language called xbase++. The final solution was to use Citrix initially and when demand was higher would then have the revenue needed to convert it to a web-based system.
• Created an online livestock community that also served as the vehicle for marketing the herd management software.

As my first job out of college, consulting proved a real challenge for me as I had to quickly sharpen my technical axe but more importantly I had to develop soft skills.

• Developer at Pioneer Hi-Bred on a team that delivered a system to manage all of their products (corn, soybeans, etc) from pre-planting through harvest. In addition to basic programming duties, I was specifically responsible for working with middleware (IBM MQ Series) to get product harvest data over to the SAP ERP system.
• Developed a system for Norwest Mortgage (since bought by Wells Fargo) that stored meta data about all the mainframe systems so they could develop a detailed plan to consolidate as many systems as possible.
• Developed an enterprise system for The Sunflower Group in Kansas City that allowed them to include product samples in all major newspapers in the country. This included a complex GIS component for identifying the paper routes which included households in the target demographics for a given client.
• Built a real-time stock system for a small agriculture start-up company. The system would read commodities information from FutureSource, import it into an Oracle database and display the information on the web to their customers. This was all run under Linux doing basic serial port programming in C.

This part of a cooperative education job I had while in college and it taught me one important thing...I don't like writing software that talks too directly to hardware.

• Helped developed real-time embedded code to run on Rockwell's PLGR II generation of hand held GPS units. This experience included interfacing with hardware on bread boards and dumping contents of memory to the VAX in order to debug memory values.
• Responsible for building the language modules needed to support a variety of languages including Arabic.
• Learned the internals of how GPS works as well as the application of selective availability (SA).
• Exposed to ISO 9001 certification process as well as the governmental bid process.
• Obtained secret level security clearance with the U.S. Government.

"Fed Up of Framework Hype?"
    DC PHP Conference (2008)
"Software Development: Building Better Idiots"
    University of Northern Iowa (2007)
"Project Management: Professional Fan Cleaners"
    University of Northern Iowa (2007)
"Moving an Enterprise to PHP"
    Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (2006)
"Moving an Enterprise to PHP"
    DC Conference and Expo (2006)
"Application of UML: Use Case Driven Requirements"
    University of Northern Iowa (2007)
"Enterprise Authentication and Authorization"
    eGovernment Open Source Conference (2003)
"Advanced Find Controls in Powerbuilder"
    Sybase Powerbuilder Conference (1998)