My diverse career as a computer software developer spans over 40 years. I have worked on a wide-range of applications, including: operating system customizations, numerical scientific programming, real-time machine control, information management systems, and accounting applications. I've learned and used quite a few languages along the way because different applications are best coded in a language specific to that type of problem. I specialize in, and have been focusing on, MS Access applications for the last 24 years. The languages I use daily for MS Access applications are Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and SQL. I also do Web Application (Web Apps) development and the languages I use for Wep Apps are HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.
I offer a breadth and depth of experience that few others can match. I have done small projects, ranging in size from a few days to a few weeks effort and truly large projects that required several years of effort.
My preferred clients are the owners and managers of small or medium sized businesses because I like working directly with the decision-makers. In order to best accommodate this type of client, I make myself available for meetings and telephone calls whenever it is most convenient for them — all day and even well after normal business hours. I set my fees at a level that is realistic with respect to the resources available to my preferred client.

SUMMARY of EXPERIENCE

Over my 40-year career, I've done many kinds of applications. My early experience has been very atypical. For about the first 20 years of my career, I was a "Scientific Programmer" which simply means that I did applications other than financial and accounting systems. During the latter half of my career, I have done financial and accounting programming, so I have a rather unique and wide range of applications programming experience.
I entered the field in 1975 at the Naval Research Laboratories in Washington, D.C. where I worked on a computer program that emulated other computers in order to collect statistics about the efficiency of various computers. This program could be used, for example, to make a Windows PC run any program written for a MAC, including the MAC OS. We worked closely with professors at several universities and with researchers at other Navy sites. We communicated with each other on computers connected to a communications network called the ARPANET. The ARPANET eventually became something we are all very familiar with — the Internet! Neither I nor anyone else had any idea at the time that we were there at the beginning of an era.
Another famous project I worked on early in my career was the Hubble Space Telescope located on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I did some analysis in order to determine how much computing power and time it would take to scan photographs of the entire sky to identify suitable stars that could be used to point the telescope.
When at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Columbia, MD, I wrote a program to unencrypt telemetry data sent from missiles fired by Trident submarines. The data was encrypted in order to keep the Soviets, in particular, from being able to read the missile telemetry data.
I also worked on the instructor's station software for a C-141 Transport pilot trainer and some of the emulation software for a B-52 gunner station trainer.
While at NASA in Greenbelt, MD. I spent about 18 months designing and leading the implementation of a program that would display, in real-time, data streaming down from scientific satellites. One interesting thing about this project is that one of its main goals was to display the data using the (then) state-of-the-art 3-color displays.
I did some specialized operating system software for the operator training facilities at the Indian Point, NY Nuclear Power Plant and the Houston Lighting and Power Nuclear Power Plant. The trainers realistically simulate the power plant control rooms and are used to train the operators to run the plant.
I worked at Unites States Postal System (USPS) on two different occasions. The first time, I worked on software to sort bags of mail destined for a different cities and to find the next commercial airline flight that could take the mail to those cities. Another time, I worked on project whose aim was to study the volume of mail a carrier could deliver in a day, taking into account anything that could conceivably effect how long it would take to walk a route.
Currently, my main focus is on Information Management and Tracking applications written as MS Access desktop programs or as Web Applications. I have considerable expertise in this kind of application program. While I don't specialize in it, I am also able to leverage my MS Access experience into MS Excel spreadsheets and I have acquired some competency with MS Excel.

CURRENT EXPERIENCE

For about the last 25 years, since 1994, my career has been focused on Information Management and Tracking applications written in MS Access. MS Access is a rapid application development platform designed to support the management of a diverse range of applications centered around information management. It is widely considered the best such development platform for Windows PCs. While MS Access easily supports small, departmental needs, it is also quite capable of satisfying the large and complex requirements of company-wide information management application. What follows are just some of the MS Access projects I have written since 1994.
My experience in MS Access began with a firm that purchased mortgages and tax liens, packaging them into securities based on several criteria. Their purchases were highly-leveraged so that timely and accurate knowledge about the value and performance of both the packaged and single securities on their books was essential financial information. This was also when I first became an independent software consultant.
I developed a system for Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to help them keep track of donors and donations. By using mathematics to analyze the situation, I was able to identify and handle situations that they did not know, until that time, had even existed.
Another inventory system was created for a client who maintained industrial machines. Parts were often obtained from EBay and several often-used parts were purchased for the immediate repair and to keep in inventory. Over time, the time part might be purchase from several sellers. The purchase price and quantity on hand needed to be tracked for each item.
I did some significant enhancements and maintenance to a large system for a university to track alumni, student loans, student applications, and class registrations. There were about 40 simultaneous users of this MS Access program.
One very large project was a Parts Catalog and Inventory System for a company that installed and maintained devices that scrubbed pollution from industrial smokestacks. The company had their own Part Numbers which needed to be cross-referenced to multiple suppliers of the parts. The Parts used in each of the devices needed to be noted so that when a device needed maintenance, the necessary repair parts could easily determined. They needed to know what Parts were currently in their inventory so that they could either pull the part from their own inventory or order the part from the various suppliers of that Part.
A recent client was an independent medical services provider. This program tracked each client, along with other necessary information such as their birth date, Social Security Number, and insurance provider. It kept precise track of the time spent on each client's tasks because the time spent servicing each client was the primary income stream. Expenses, such as parking and tolls, were also tracked and charged back to the client. The nature of this business is that there are always at least a few outstanding tasks to be accomplished for each of around 10 to 15 active clients and so the program also had features that allowed the tracking of these many outstanding tasks. In addition, a simple invoicing system was part of the system.
There are some examples of my work and writing posted on my GitHub repository which can be found here: GitHub.