Change in Status

Posted: September 29, 2009 | | Categories: Delphi, Microsoft Windows

I recently had a change of employment status and I thought I'd write about it here just in case anyone out there knew of someone who had a need for my skills either as a contract worker or full time employee.

I've been a professional software developer since…well, for a very long time. I started out writing software programs to automate Physics experiments for the University of Akron then branched out into consulting, working for several different firms until I got my job at Research In Motion.

I became a Novell Certified NetWare Engineer then Novell Certified NetWare Instructor. When I began my Lotus Notes career – I quickly became a Lotus Certified Notes Instructor (one of the first batch certified outside of Lotus). Because of this, I spent a great many years as a full time instructor and finely tuned my presentation skills.

My first big accomplishment was an IBM Beacon Award for Biggest Business Impact in 1997 for an application I helped design for Key Bank. We designed and built a system for managing the merchant setup process for credit card processing. The system we built decreased the merchant setup process from 12 to 5 days and involved a very complicated series of integrations with mainframe-based systems all over the US. It was an expensive application to build, but generated a significant return on investment for the bank.

I've created several commercial software products using Borland (now Embarcadero) Delphi as well as Lotus Notes/Domino.  The most successful Domino one is a product called Automated Deployment Toolkit (ADT) for Lotus Notes. It was an IBM Beacon Award winner in 2002 in the Best Tool/Utility category. It's a product that is still sold today and has been a very successful product for Wolcott Group. For ADT, I did all of the initial product development – building it into a full, commercial product before bringing on additional developers to help maintain and support the product. I was ultimately responsible for development, sales, support, documentation and managing our relationships with partners including IBM (ADT's biggest reseller).

I created ConfigSave for Lotus Notes – a tool that allowed you to save and restore Notes configurations and easily switch between configurations. In 2002 it won the Lotus Advisor Magazine award for Cool New Tool. I also created ClientSync – a more reliable competitor for the roaming capabilities IBM added to Notes in an earlier version.

My favorite commercial application I created is a product called Official's Record Keeper (ORK) – an application for managing all of the data a sports official needs to track. There's a free trial version available for download or it can be purchased here. If you know of any sports officials, please send them that link.

As an employee at RIM, I worked with AT&T to support their customers with building BlackBerry applications. I regularly educated customers on the capabilities of the platform and made sure they had everything they needed to build these apps. I became then a subject matter expert on the capabilities of the platform and the tools available to build the apps.  It's these skills that prepared me for writing the book. My enterprise application experience gave me just the right skills to understand exactly what they were going through. I applied the same customer service attitude I used with my software products to make sure every customer was taken care of.

Through all of this, I became a very detail oriented and reliable project and product manager, writer and presenter. As I mentioned, I'm looking for contract work immediately – either project management, Domino, Delphi or BlackBerry development or delivering training classes.  I'd be most interested in doing BlackBerry development work (a bonus but not a requirement would be for it to be on Domino).  For the long term, I'm looking for a position leveraging any of my skills. I'm ultimately interested in becoming Director of Mobile Development for the right company but will do any type of work as long as it exercises my brain, leverages existing skills and/or helps me gain new skills.

If you know of anything or hear of anything, please let me know – you can use the 'Contact Me' link in the navigation area on the left to contact me.  Thanks for listening (reading).

I had a conversation the other day with my good friend Rocky Oliver. He's in the same boat as I am and is getting back online. Check out his site when you get a chance.

Next Post: Domino & BlackBerry Java Applications Part 3

Previous Post: Domino & BlackBerry Java Applications Part 2.5