Professional Background

Contract Programming:

Dec 2006 - Now
Maximus Hartford, CT
Access Database Programmer

Maximus is a substantial IT consulting firm serving primarily the government sector. As part of their team working for the State of Connecticut's Department of Social Services (DSS), I created a program in Access 2003 to replace a large and intricate set of Excel spreadsheets that managed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) as well as Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).

There are 12 Agencies involved in this within the Connecticut DSS with names such as Dept. of Children and Families, Dept. of Corrections, Dept of Labor, Judicial, Office of State Treasurer, and so on. Each has many programs and subprograms and are served by many providers. The need was to unify all this data and allow systematic quarterly imports of data from many sources to replace all the manual spreadsheet manipulations that went on before.

An additional task was to create complex Access forms that allocate monies from various funding streams to these programs and then estimate what would be required for the following fiscal year. The program also distills all the actual distributions into two formal annual reports named ACF-196 (TANF) and ACF-696 (CCDF).

Mar 2007 - Now
Disetronics Sterile Products Portsmouth, NH
Access Database Programmer
Contact: Glen Stadig 603-427-5511 Ext 227

Disetronic is a subsidiary of Hoffmann LaRoche. In a clean-room environment, they manufacture clinical devices, especially insulin pumps for diabetics. They had a pressing need to improve the tracking of numbered worklots to track the entire manufacturing cycle. We divided the4 work into two major tasks: Warehousing and Production.

As Einstein once said about hypotheses, "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler."Before doing any coding, we spent the first week just designing the data schema needed to support both sides of their world. With this careful analysis, we were able to do the job with a minimal number of tables. The schema was reduced to a core set named tblLotMaster, tblWarehouse, tblItemMaster, tblSuppliers, tblTransactionLog, and just a few other lookup tables. .

Oct 2006 - Dec 2006
Accurate Brazing, Inc, Goffstown, NH
Access Database Programmer

Bud had created a very extensive set of operational and financial programs in Access 95. Deployed on 15 PCs throughout the plant, the code was getting severely out of shape because of the variety of operating systems and hardware that it was being asked to run on. It was overdue for an upgrade. Using my offsite lab, I upgraded 4 front-ends plus 4 back-end .mdbs all the way to Access 2003 with no intermediate versions. As is typical, the data went through this process fine, but there were severe anomalies (reported as VBA corruptions) with the Forms and Reports modules. With care and singling out the bad actors for special treatment, the whole set of programs was put into production within three weeks from start.

Jun 2006 - Aug 2006 and
Jul 2003 - Dec 2003
PAX World Funds, Portsmouth, NH (Access 2003)
Access Database Programmer
This mutual fund company hired me to finish the work started by a previous Access database programmer. The program tracks commissions owed to brokers all across the country on all kinds of mutual fund transactions. A quartely import of data is required and I automated this to make liffe easy for the administrator (Michelle). I later took on Access projects in several other departments. PAX continutes to use me for general database support.

May 2004 - Jun 2006
UNITIL, Hampton, NH (Access 2003)
Access Database Programmer
This is the local electric company. They have a program called Demand-Side Management (DSM) that imports data from a wide variety of formats from many vendors. Formerly, it took a serious and tedious effort to handle all the different import and data transformations and calculations in Excel spreadsheets. This was quite tedious and error-prone--in fact there was a huge backlog of data to import. I automated this using Access.

Dec 2003 - May 2004
Fisher Scientific World Headquarters, Hampton, NH (Access 2002)
Database Programmer
Now named Thermo-Fisher, this major supplier of laboratory instrumentation and equipment had a dozen Access databases containing the results of multiple Quarterly Customer Satisfaction Surveys. They needed a data-aware programmer to unify this data and migrate it into one so that it could be properly queried and reported on and so information across quarters and across divisions would make sense. After merging all data into one set of normalized tables, I have achieved functional equivalence. I am proceeding to rewrite existing queries and add new queries/reports to address the new simplified schema. We are doing this in such a way that an eventual merge of this "seed" data will easily transform into a full CRM system by means of migration into a Siebel ODS (Operational Data Store).

Oct 2003 - Feb 2004
Strafford County, Dover, NH (Access 2002 / Oracle)
Database Programmer
A new mandate in the State of New Hampshire requires all agencies (>300) to begin reporting all pension payroll deductions and related information for all state employees via a file in XML format. Strafford County has 310 employees to report on and the resulting XML rendition is over 4000 lines long. Roger located me from a web search (oracle programmer nh) and I did the job using Visual Basic.

It turns out that we were the only ones to get our file validated within the deadline. All other agencies used the fallback approach of fixed width ascii or CSV or they begged for more time.

Jul 2004 - Oct 2004
ProTracker, Inc., Hampton, NH (Access 2003)
Access Database Programmer
ProTracker is a software development firm with a product of the same name offered to a market consisting of Financial Planners. Data needed to be imported from their ECommerce website into a local database, then out to Peachtree accounting.

Feb 2004 - May 2004
Acme Brick Company, Sealy, TX (VB.NET, ADO.NET)
DotNet Programmer
A large brick plant just outside of Houston located us by searching for our skillset on the Web. We created a quality control program for their production engineer using DotNet technologies that monitored a high resolution video camera. This camera was continually focused on a production line of precured and precut bricks called a "slug". Periodically, the line operator clicks a button to take a picture of the line going by at 1 foot per second. Our software grabs a frame from the continuous video stream and displays it on a color monitor side by side with a picture of a known high quality standard for that particular style of brick. Depending on the visual comparison, the operator can take appropriate action such as calling for a change in mixture or other operating parameters. If quality is good, he simply does nothing. We log the picture taking events in order to track the operator taking pictures on a prescribed frequency. Hidden from the operator, there is a secured maintenance module so the engineer can periodically check the log, add new standards, tune the camera settings, and perform other data management features.

May 2003 - June 2003
Tyco International, Exeter, NH (Access 2002)
Database Programmer
A local programming house named Compass Systems and Programming created an Employee Performance program in Access that is deployed at 100 worldwide regions. There were two very different versions, one for upper management and one for everyone else. I merged the two code bodies and reproduced all the pre-existing functionality.

Just for fun, I changed some employees names and ids and published a subset of the data to our password protected .NET website in an editable datagrid. I did this to demonstrate our skills with DotNet and to show the value of centralized, up-to-date, and secure data as well as XML and web services. Currently, like so many others, Tyco exchanges data between regions via EMail attachment of Excel spreadhseets.

Feb 2003 - May 2003
BMR Thermal, Hampton, NH (Access and Excel 2002)
Database Programmer
BMR is a regional sales office for a major West Coast supplier of furnace/boiler equipment. I analyzed the Excel spreadsheet system they had been using to manage the regional sales activities and built a completely new territory and customer management system, including parts inventory and history. I provided easy links to Word documents for quotes and order processing under a MailMerge subsystem.

Feb 2003 - June 2003
Big Brothers-Big Sisters, Exeter, NH
Database Programmer
This is a highly visible branch of a nonprofit organization that matches and places underprivileged or troubled children with mature and stable adult mentors. The staff needed to migrate their Excel-based data collection into a database that would coordinate their activities and take them into the future. I am doing that plus providing links to the national database which resides on the Web.

Jan 2003 - Feb 2003
Genesys Software Corp., Methuen, MA
Software Developer: Crystal Reports, SQL Server 2000
Program: People Come First -- a Web-based Human Resources program. I developed in Crystal Reports (Ver 8.5 against a complex MS SQL Server 2000 database. As part of a tight and highly skilled team of five developers, I helped provide a scalable web-based solution for managing the access and delivery of hundreds of Crystal reports for Genesys clients. These client reports had to be carefully constructed and often rested on SQL joins of up to 20 tables. In this enterprise reporting solution, a very important aspect was speed optimization. The query (view) underlying a particular report was written to take advantage of server-side processing. Conducted training for the development team in Crystal Reports at the beginning and intermediate level.

Aug 2002 - Dec, 2002
Critical Care Systems,Nashua,NH
Programmer/Consultant in SQL Server/MS Access Database /VB
Program: CareNet (used at 24 branch sites across the US).  Prepared data from their legacy in-home healthcare program to move onto SQL Server. I used ERWin, the high-end entity relationship analytical tool to create SQL scripts for about 400 tables. Using these, the data was moved onto SQL Server 7.0. I scrubbed the old data extensively in order to eliminate duplicate keys and totally blank records. One of the immediate benefits will be better key management, especially primary keys, new and better constraints, as well as stored procedures and triggers that were never implemented on the original tables. Cutover of this program has been postponed, but the data side is ready to go.

Aug 2001 - Oct 2002
UnumProvident Insurance, Portland, ME
Web Development
Created and tested two Websites for HR.  One that allows employees to register questions regarding their benefits and which sends EMail to a UNUM HelpDesk and one that allows employees and retirees to view their pension benefits. Used Visual InterDev, Visual Studio/Visual Basic, and MS Office components, SQL Server7.

Pension Administration.  As part of a large team of pension managers, analysts, and technicians, I managed a transition of a large database involving over 30,000 current employees plus retirees (pension annuitants) from an outside vendor to in-house usage.  Used Microsoft Access, Excel, and Visual Basic.

Jan 2000 - Jul 2001
State of NH, Concord, NH
Programmer/Contractor in MS Access
Created WIA Tracking and Reporting System (Dept of Labor mandated)
Created Dept of Youth Services Tracking System.

Sep 1999 - Nov 1999
Holyoke Mutual Insurance, Salem, MA
Developer in Access 97.  (Contract)
Created complete multiuser system to track all Agents, Staff, Lines of Business, Agent Evaluations, Business Volume, and other entities.

Aug 1999 - Sep 1999
Wolverine Manufacturing, Merrimack, MA
Programmer/Consultant/DBA in VB6/SQL Server 7 (Contract)
Performed maintenance and bugfixes for a large Client/Server manufacturing application.

Sep 1998 to Feb 1999
Cabot Corp., Billerica and Boston, MA
Programmer / Contractor in SQL Server, Access, Crystal Reports, ERWIn.
Using a wide variety of modern tools on a Windows NT platform  to render enhancements and support to five major areas:
1) The company's WinLIMS application, a globally used lab sample/results/finance tracking system
2) Crystal Reports
3) The Analytical Billing System (ABS) and 24 other lab-oriented Access databases.
4) Y2K compliance studies of all systems
5) Long Term Incentive (LTI) program developed from scratch in Access.

July 1998 - Sep 1998
State of Mass. Dept of Public Health, Boston, MA
Women, Infants, Children program ("WIC")
WIC is a statewide program (140 sites) administered with complex software written in Clipper 5.2. This was primarily a Y2K job which used my Clipper, Access, and VBA skills to thoroughly analyze the system to insure that no little children will starve after 1999.

May 1998 - July 1998
Cambridge Technology Partners, Cambridge, MA
Senior Developer for globally deployed Sigma Sales Software
Visual Basic and Access 97 used to enhance this large Siebel Systems Sales Management system.  Client/Server with Windows NT/Oracle.

Jan 1998 - Dec 1998
Liberty Mutual, Dover, NH
New Life Business System
Full life cycle development of  this complex data mining and reporting system including fully automatic downloads from their mainframe.  Extensive use of SQL and very complex joins of up to 30 tables/ queries and subqueries.  Liberty continues to call me in to add new reports and tweak older ones.

Mar 1996 - Jan 1998
The New England, Boston, MA
Lead Designer/Programmer for Sales Illustration Software
3500 life insurance agents and brokerages around the country depend on this complex multi-product software which was written in Turbo Pascal. Although The New England has a more powerful Windows product, the older (legacy) code must be maintained at least through 1998 since many of their user sites are not Windows capable.

Apr 1994 - Mar 1996
Watson Wyatt Company; Wellesley, MA
Contractor/Programmer in Compensation Analysis and Flexible Benefits
Wyatt's Boston office is responsible for the maintenance of elaborate Human Resources software, called WyComp. There are Clipper and Access versions installed at many worldwide Fortune 500 client firms, hospitals, and universities. While on contract to Wyatt for a year and a half, I made extensive modifications and wrote many new utilities. I was responsible for design, coding, testing, customization, and maintenance updates on complex multiuser software. I served as technical expert on phone support as well as field trips to client sites with the the HR consultants.

Independent Database Programming:

2003 - Present
Working from my own company: BrightWork Solutions,  Hampton, NH
A technology consulting company specializing in web design and improvement, search engine positioning (SEP) The firm's specialty is the science of Website Optimization that provides increased web visibility and traffic. We create this by understanding and working with the ever-changing search engines that are constantly indexing the World Wide Web. John Raleigh and developer Jason have over 20 years of combined web and multimedia experience.

1982 - 1994
Working from my own company:TT&T Corp,  Hampton, NH
Microcomputer applications development company. Wide variety of jobs focusing on Clipper, Basic, C, and MicroFocus Cobol programming, about 35 Novell network installations, and many accounting installation and training. Over 12 years of experience with about 300 clients including Fortune 500 firms, the local police network, and the "store on the corner". Please see Addendum of programming abstracts.

Salaried Programming:

Formal Education

Chemistry (Math minor): Bowdoin College (BS 1966)
Chemical Engineering: UC Berkeley 1969-70 2 yrs on campus
Computer Science: Univ. of NH 1984-85 2 yrs on campus 20 units of core computer science
Computer Science: 1995 MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) - Access
Computer Science: Northeastern Univ. 1997 - Advanced C course
Computer Science: NH Technical Institute. 2003 - 50 hrs of Microsoft DotNet coursework

Professional Memberships/Certifications

Boston Computer Soc. (now defunct, but I was the founder of the NH Branch in 1982)
Business Network International
Hampton Chamber of Commerce
American Prod/Inv Control Society (APICS)
Microsoft Certified in Access Development, SQL Server

Other Great Resources

Jerry Gilmore, Programmer
Eric Phetteplace, Voice Technology solutions (NextIVR)
Mackensen & Company, Inc.(Financial Planners)