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.