Who I Am

Entrepreneur

More than 25 years ago I started my first “official” company, and eCommerce startup selling luxury goods online. “Official” is in quotes as I started moonlighting as a technical consultant with a d/b/a “LPC Consulting” back in 1986 providing personal and corporate consulting services for corporate executives at Cognos Corporation and several Boston-area tech companies.

Along the way I’ve had several successful startups, several of which were multi-million-dollar companies with a couple dozen employees. I’ve played a pivotal role in helping several technology companies built their teams and pitch decks from scratch to secure millions in funding. Today I maintain an ongoing SaaS business while providing fractional CTO services as part of Charleston Software Associates, LLC ; My eight startup company in just over two decades.

Software Engineer

I’ve been writing software since I was 12. In 2022 I took a technical skills survey from a software development contract. Here is what they had to say:

Full Stack: You have a deep understanding (5+ yrs) of modern full stack development (Angular, Node, React, CSS, Less, Grunt, Bower, gulp) with readable, maintainable, performant code

Node, CSS, Sass (vs. Less), Grunt are part of the weekly routine.   Familiar with Bower, Gulp, and WebPack — using them in limited project tasks.  Familiar with Vue/Vuetify and Foundation as well as React. I’ve been used Ant Design with React in the past and now use Material UI for a lot of projects.   Limited exposure to Angular.

Agile: You are experienced in lean startup, agile development practices

Employed this process in many projects in the past.

Containers: You are accustomed to developing code in a CI/D environment using Docker

Good understanding of container-based deployments.   Have not used Docker but understand the concept.  Very familiar with virtual environments.  Using Virtualbox through Vagrant and VVV deployments regularly. (Update: my latest projects are Docker-centric and I’ve become well versed in Docker since this survey.)

REST: You are experienced with RESTful API design and development

Use REST in multiple facets of the Store Locator Plus application as well as external services for the application.  Solid understanding of AJAX and SOAP as well.

Quality: You care about quality and you know what it means to ship and maintain high-quality code

Shipping production software to over 20,000 installed sites means code must be stable when released.   Unit and regression testing is part of the deployment process.  Full understanding of Selenium IDE and building an solid knowledge of automated web testing via Selenium Webdriver. (Update: I’ve also been using Cypress.IO extensively for end-to-end testing on recent projects).

Data

I am well versed in structured database design having in-depth experience in several SQL databases especially MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as their open source variants like MariaDB and Aurora. I have been working with GraphQL and DynamoDB lately as part of the new projects learning Amplify application deployment leveraging their connections to AWS Datastore and Appsync among other tools.