Career History

Baby Steps

1999, last year of college at UVA. English major, minimal skills (other than superfast typing - best skill ever!). Wondered what I was going to do for a job, went to a temp agency while in my last semester. First placement was doing data entry on the Al Gore presidential campaign. After a couple of months, the boss thought that maybe I was semi-smart, or at least smarter than the average keypuncher, and asked if I wanted to start programming. Sure! So I started customizing the MS Access data entry/scanning/imaging system he had built.

Quickly I was off data entry and was now the full time programmmer. Now we wanted to move to the newish world wide web with a FEC (Federal Election Commission) compliance and reporting application for small political action committees. The now long dead asp.net FEC Reporting application was born. I was the lead programmer, in good old VBScript, with a SQL backend.

Improving

After the campaign ended and FEC reporting didn't take off, I wanted to get out of Charlottesville VA and move back to the DC area. Got a job at an investment bank developing their online trading platform. First experience with large corporate politics. Well soon enough, they investment bank decided retail brokerage wasn't their thing, and I got moved to being a general programmer in the IT department. Meh. About this time .NET framework came out.

Rocking

Went back to work for the policital guy in a telecommute scenario. Rebuilt the Access donation processing system using VB6 (wanted to salvage as much code as possible from Access and it was an easy port). Integrated with VisionShape check scanners. Handled all the 2004 Democratic presidential campaigns.

Started doing some things on the side. Built an advisor/manager platform for an investment advisory firm in Chicago. Democratic work slowed down and and I went to a restauraunt big data firm. Built a variety of things there - agent applications to run on restaurant point of sale systems to suck in dining check level data, a .NET parser loader application to shove all this into a SQL data warehouse, and a frontend .NET/SQL Server reporting web application.

Took a new challenge and ran the development shop for an Indian offshore firm. Interesting hours. Not much skill offshore - I was actually doing half the development. I did get a trip to India out of the deal though. Figured out all this was not for me.

On My Own

Round 3 of political consulting. This time full time on my own as a subcontractor. Built a .NET scanning application to handle all the check imaging and processing. Integrated with the newly deployed Check 21 apis to clear checks automatically at the bank using just images. This was way before you could deposit check on your mobile phone. Handled all the donation processing for the Obama and Clinton campaigns in 2008. Integrated with payment gateways such as Authorize.net.

Took over the political firm when the owner retired. Synetech LLC. Its still around, but mostly for compliance activities. The check processing business is a race to the bottom. I knew I needed a new gig.

Finally Got It

2009 started Falcon Logic with my partner Shazia Noreen. We quickly got into government contracting. Stable, good money. Learned a lot of new skills including accounting, business development, contracting, wow. Since then, I've built...geez.

• C# WebForms applications
• C# MVC REST Api
• Angular apps
• AWS Microservices - Lambda, S3, SNS, SQS
• Apache cordova apps
• C# business automation systems
• the list goes on...

Still having fun!