Decades of Database & Application Design experience

tenacious Application Architect deeply invested into perfecting transformation of business processes & data requirements into user interfaces & application functionality.

Rethinking, reorganizing, refining and reiteration are important components of the software development process. Using Info Digger as a starting point drastically reduces App development duration.

My primary aim is producing applications that other developers eventually manage and use as a blueprint for further App development.

I've built applications for Insider Trading compliance, ETL processes, data warehouses, Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) implementation, union labor, cost accounting, warehouse management, equipment tracking and inventory control with WebSocket, SFTP, email, PDF and Office Automation integration.

10 years experience in 'Oracle Applications' Integration developing custom Manufacturing Tooling & Tool Inventory, Item Specifications, Activities and Documents, Production Scheduling and QC/QA applications that incorporate data from Oracle schemas BOM, INV, WIP, ONT, PO, APPLSYS, APPS, HR, AP, AR, GL & JTF.

From 1997 until 2010 I lived on the Upper Eastside working in Manhattan & Brooklyn as a data systems consultant for financial, educational, manufacturing and real estate organizations.

Now I live on a pre-Civil War farm in a 1861 built house close to Vermont border and Adirondack Region in a historic Upstate New York hamlet raising cows, restoring agricultural land, growing food, clearing old forest trails and building applications.

My degree is in Mechanical Engineering and before my software career I worked for Ahlstrom Kamyr as a field engineer building pulp and paper mills in 5 States and 2 Providences in Canada. My responsibilities were fulfillment of contract specifications, project schedule, procurement and logistics of equipment.

Construction projects are a complex series of activities requiring a wide variety of highly specialized materials, many of which are custom-built for the specific job. This project management position required tracking and scheduling of milestones, subcontractors, equipment and material.

I began using dBase III which came pre-installed on new office computers along with Lotus 123 and WordPerfect. That was the beginning of my software career.

In 1993 I formed a software consulting company - Black Diamond Software and the Summer of 1996 I started the creation of a product called Info Digger developed with Microsoft Visual FoxPro 5.0 which is an object-oriented programming language with a powerful data engine.

From 1998 to 2016 I built & supported custom business applications for clients using Info Digger as an application framework which I was constantly improving non-stop until Visual FoxPro 9.0.

In March 2007, Microsoft announced that there would be no VFP 10, thus making VFP9 (released to manufacturing on December 17, 2004) the last commercial VFP release from Microsoft. Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 was released on October 16, 2007. The support of Version 9 ended on January 13, 2015.

Almost 20 years of my life was invested into development of Info Digger using a Microsoft Development Tool that Microsoft made obsolete. Visual FoxPro has it's own database engine not requiring SQL Server. Visual FoxPro Applications can handle hundreds of users without SQL Server licensing fees. It was direct competition for Microsoft profits. Many devoted Visual FoxPro developers (including me) protested and held out hope Microsoft would reconsider.

I learned a lesson, spent months evaluating Web stack technologies and prototyping migration paths capable of replacing Info Digger. Initially started with Java Spring Boot but after prototype builds and much testing that slowly changed.

Info Digger has been rewritten as a REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture for the World Wide Web. The core classes and langauge is TypeScript with two tiers of ES6 modules. Browser ES6 module runs HTML5, CSS, Document Object Model (DOM) & JavaScript front-tier. Node.js ES6 Express module incorporates FETCH, AJAX and JSON technologies with abstract data classes middle-tier to access MySQL and Oracle databases.

All the knowledge in object-orientated development and data-centric design has been transferred to better technology and a modern web application framework.