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I have been writing code since 1995, when my now ex-wife brought home a Tandy
1000 and I started "playing" with it.I bought books on DOS, and then BASIC, then
someone gave me a copy of Borland C++ 1.0, and I was hooked.
At the time I was working as an Estimator/Project Manager for electrical
construction, which I'd done since graduating high school. I was working for a
small electrical contractor, Owen Electric in St Augustine, FL. When I went to
work for Mr Owen, he had ten electricians and his wife kept the books using the
old Nebs checkbook system, turning it over to his accountant weekly to balance
his checkbook. Not very elegant.
I setup an old DOS-based accounting system, Cougar Mountain, on a computer at
the office and Mr Owen and I networked two machines together, one at his desk,
one at mine. Together we set up a complete inventory control system, accounting,
job costing, etc. I not only bid and ran projects but acted as his bookkeeper.
I left Owen to return to school full time at the University of Central Florida.
Ten years later, Mr Owen employs over 300 electricians - I speak to him from
time to time - and still uses the same systems we put in place (although he's of
course upgraded the accounting system to Timberline).
I had to leave school to be with my mother in Huntsville, AL. I started working
for Fiscal Systems in Huntsville, who made POS software for convenience store
chains that ran on Dr DOS with a Xenix backend. Xenix was a short lived version
of UNIX. I wrote in a text editor on a terminal emulator. Ahh, the good old
days.
While there, someone had a demo copy of Delphi and I took it home and wrote a
windows-based program for the shipping and receiving dept. This was my first
intro to a IDE and OOP. Phil Moore, the owner of Fiscal, was impressed enough
that he asked me if I could write a windows version of thier backend software,
which I began.
I was offered a job with another POS vendor in the same area, Intellilink. I
originally was hired to convert the Access database to MSDE, but was pulled off
of that project to build a "data mining" solution for customers. The owner of
Intellink, Dave Thomas, who was a salesman, had seen data mining at a convention
and thought it was "sellable".
I built a OLAP solution on top of a SQL Server version of the Access database,
mechanisms for transferring the data via a VPN, scrubbing it, and manipulating
it until it was usable. "This is where the rubber meets the road" was how Dave
introduced me to vistors.
I left Intellink and moved to Mobile, AL where I now live. I started working for
Site One on the Internet, a web design/hosting company. I built my first .NET
web application for Dick Scott of SiteOne, which was an online store with a
membership scheme that gave discounts for refererals, sort of an Amway
operation.
I built search engines for Real Estate brokers. I built a complete order
entry/shipping system for a small company in Fairhope, AL. All of this was done
in VB.NET with a SQL Server backend.
While at SiteOne, I met Carey Perry, the owner of the Bluesheet, and did a great
deal of work for him and his website, thebluesheetonline.com, including
mechanisms to convert and parse document images with court data on them. I've
done a lot of work doing document conversions.
I've also written the bulk of the
software used by Motor Carrier Consultants, a DOT compliance company here in
Mobile, including several programs that interface with Quickbooks using the
Quickbooks SDK. There's a document here that describes this system. I also wrote
the customer portion of their website, which can be seen here (login as demo and
demo).
Currently I am working with Mobile Pulley Works, a large and very old
company in Mobile that builds dredges and large pumps for dredges
internationally. This was my first introduction into Epicor. I was initally
contracted to rewrite almost 100 engineering programs written in GW-Basic over
twenty years ago into a windows based GUI.
While there, I found myself
rebuilding their network and I've been in the process of helping them upgrade
from Vista 6.1 to 8.03, and then to 9.0. I've looked at Epicor's solutions for
customization and finding them lacking, have setup mechanisms with linked
servers and ODBC to pull data from the Progress DB to a SQL Server DB, building
Crystal Reports from there (and also some desktop based interfaces).
I find the
XML based BAQ stuff just a little too slow and clumsy. I'm just finishing up a
simplified version of the MES software that our workers find much easier to use.
This collects time data to a sql server database, and allows division managers
to review and correct the data before posting it to the actual progress
database.
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