Dallas, Texas, United States
I am a software development leader with a 20-year career that includes CTO experience, entrepreneurial product development, and individual contributor engineering roles. Currently I am focused on my software business that provides two products used by law firms to submit and retrieve case data. I previously served as CTO of ElectSolve, a startup providing smart meter systems for the utility industry that was acquired in 2018. My experience includes building high-performance teams within healthy engineering cultures, establishing development processes, and guiding technical strategy and roadmapping. I have extensive experience in implementation and management of integration services to ensure highest levels of system availability and performance. I am also dedicated to maintaining my technical skills and regularly take online courses, with recent studies in Kubernetes, Google Cloud (Machine Learning, Data Engineering),Serverless, and MongoDB. In addition to my experience, I earned an MBA, MS in Systems Technology, and BS in Biochemistry all from LSU Shreveport. Specialities: Communication skills, coding discipline toward performance, data analysis, scalability, reusability.
I founded a company in 2019 to build and market niche software products used by law offices in New Jersey for filing complaints and collecting notices from the courts (Jefis eCourts). The tech stack includes C#, SOAP web services, Java, and Powershell. In addition to development, I also lead sales, implementations, training, and product support.
ElectSolve was a bootstrapped startup that provides smart utility metering solutions acquired by IPKeys in 2018. After five years in management and engineering roles I was named CTO in 2008 and continued in that role until 2019, serving as a remote CTO for the last five years. I led a team of up to 12 engineers in delivering ~25 applications, and supporting over 100 apps and 30+ databases. I also ran an overseas team in India. My work included onboarding and training hires, setting their comp plans, implementing employee development programs for skills uplift, and mentoring. I focused on fostering a blameless culture and establishing programs and processes to set teams up for success. Projects included introducing new interview and onboarding processes inspired by Joel Spolsky's "Make Better Software", implementing CI/CD and its related tooling, increasing deployment automation, and introducing monitoring. Software projects spanned products and applications for data analysis, electric meter usage forecasting, data pipelines, and much more, leveraging machine learning and a mostly Microsoft stack: C#, SQL Server, R, MVC.NET, Azure, REST, SOAP, RabbitMQ, Tibco.
In this role I managed and grew the development team from four to eight members in a hybrid player/coach role. Project highlights included implementing CruiseControl.Net for CI and a UI redesign for all web apps that led to our product attracting Aclara to use ElectSolve in all of their customer locations. Other projects included a facilities management web app implemented at a Georgia university, the MultiSpeak data collection/exchange product (C#, ASP.NET, MongoDB), and electricity data validation and estimation tools.
I initially joined ElectSolve as employee #3.
Praeses is a consulting firm providing business process, mobile application development, and Agile consultation. Project highlights: • Health Plus of Louisiana - Contributed to data integration and migration to a new enterprise system that included data cleansing, validation, and loading. Developed new applications to improve insurance reporting. • Kilpatrick Life Insurance - Wrote an application for insurance sales teams in VB6. • Liftline - Built a web application used by municipal workers to schedule pick-ups and drop-offs for handicapped passengers on city transit. Stack included ASP, CSS, JavaScript, IIS, and Oracle on Windows.
Ischemia & Re-perfusion of the Rat Mesentery to testing drugs. What is Ischemia & Re-perfusion? Stopping blood flow to an area for a period of time and then restoring the blood flow. We were looking for drugs to stop veins from leaking interstitial fluid caused by the red blood cells sticking to the walls of the veins after blood flow was restricted for a period of time. I would clamp off the vein for a few minutes, then release the clamp. We used microscopes with cameras to film the red blood cells sticking or not sticking to the wall of the vein. I had lots of VHS tapes with pulsing arteries and veins and it was so cool to slow the footage down and see the red blood cells moving through the vein. Our goal was to apply drugs and collect data sets and look for trends in the drugs which prevented leaking from the cell wall. Science is cool.