Resume

Work Experience

Founder + CEO (2012 – Present) responsiveX, Chicago, IL

  • Help customers create great web, mobile and client experiences using cloud services.
  • Consult and provide cloud computing and Windows Azure training.
  • Architecture and software design consulting.
  • Windows Azure MVP and Azure Circle Partner.

Director, Chicago + Cloud Practice (2010 – 2012) Centare Group, Ltd, Brookfield, WI

  • Bringing Centare to Chicago in 2011.
  • Deliver cloud computing solutions with Windows Azure, BPOS and Office 365.
  • Consult and train ALM, Agile, Scrum, Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS).
  • Assist customers with application development using .NET 4 including WPF, WCF, WF and ASP.NET MVC.

Senior Director of IT (2010) ATC Transportation, LLC, Pleasant Prairie, WI

  • Set enterprise-wide IT direction for ATC, a specialized transportation company with locations spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico, to leverage existing and new technology investments to drive business value for external and internal customers.
  • Set and managed the $4MM+ IT budget for the enterprise hardware, licensing, connectivity, communications, personnel, training, contractors and new initiatives.
  • Managed execution of software development, infrastructure, communications and service desk projects, including creating project charters, managing resources and budget, driving schedules, identifying risks and developing release plans.
  • Prepared and delivered project updates for the Business Units and customers. Worked with the Business Units to understand their needs where technology could provide improvement and helped establish priorities for these projects aligned with the business’ needs and priorities.
  • Lead a 5-year, $6MM dollar project to migrate the core line-of-business system from a legacy mainframe to a client-server .NET Windows Forms-based application that enabled flexibility, business agility and saved the enterprise $2MM+ annually.
  • Renegotiated the Microsoft Enterprise Licensing and saved 40% over the previous year.
  • In the 2010 IT budget, I reduced the personnel costs by 20% and the overall IT budget 15%.
  • Led virtualization effort to consolidate servers, reduce licensing costs and add high availability and redundancy through clustering.

Director of Development (2008 – 2010) ATC Transportation, LLC, Pleasant Prairie, WI

  • Set and managed the software development departmental budget for hardware, licensing, training, personnel and contractors.
  • Provided architectural and technical guidance to product development ensuring good design practices and quality processes were followed.
  • Maintained the project backlogs and issue lists. Prioritized the features with the executive leadership, stakeholders, and customers.
  • Provided employee development, coaching, mentoring, team building and training to continually develop a world-class team of developers and IT professionals.
  • Developed an environment that fostered productivity, enabled creativity and created a team that worked well together and continuously communicated which accelerated development time.

Application Development Manager (2007 – 2008) ATC Transportation, LLC, Pleasant Prairie, WI

  • Led a transformation of the development processes and team to gain predictability in schedules and quality.
  • Led the development team in developing stronger skills and encouraged Microsoft certification for the team. At the start, no one on the team had Microsoft certifications. At the end of 2008, 4 team members earned MCTS Windows Forms 2.0 status and 3 others earned MCP .NET 2.0 Framework statuses, for a total of 7 developers with Microsoft certifications.
  • Introduced application lifecycle management processes and systems, including Atlassian JIRA, to track and manage projects, issues, bugs and feature requests.
  • Recruited, interviewed and hired top talent and great team players to become part of the development team to provide leadership and mentoring in great software development practices.

Senior Developer/Team Lead (2006 – 2007) ATC Transportation, LLC, Kenosha, WI

  • Mentored the team on agile project management using SCRUM, Test-Driven Development, Refactoring and Design Patterns.
  • Setup a Continuous Integration server and build projects using CruiseControl.NET (CCNET) that executed MSBuild scripts that compiled the projects with each check-in, executed NUnit unit tests, performed static code analysis, generated API documentation using NDoc, labeled the source code repository, versioned the binaries and assemblies and archived the output in a releasable format.
  • Developed a branching strategy for delivering bug fixes and minor enhancements while new feature development is occurring simultaneously.
  • Developed the freight billing system as part of the legacy to Windows Forms migration project. The billing system is an abstract and extensible model that allows contracts and rating rules to be defined. Based on the defined contracts and rules, orders are processed and billing is generated.
  • Developed .NET 2.0 Windows Forms UI’s for the enterprise transportation management system. Utilized Win Forms, .NET 2.0 Data binding, CSLA domain entity objects and developed custom controls.

Consultant (2005 – 2006) ATC Transportation, LLC, Joplin, MO

  • Contributed to the development of a base class library used as the core of the .NET solutions for the legacy mainframe to .NET Windows Forms migration project.
  • Contributed to the initial development of modules and components for the legacy migration project using .NET 1.1/2.0, C#, CSLA, Windows Forms and T-SQL Stored Procedures.

Co-Founder and President (2001 – 2007) Activehead, LLC, Joplin, MO

  • Founded a software consultancy and products company that provided consulting services nation-wide on software architecture, design and Microsoft technologies including .NET Framework, C#, ASP.NET and SQL Server. Activehead also provided Adobe/Macromedia Flash file format and SWFSource SDK consulting for eLearning and web content management companies.
  • Activehead was also a software products company that developed and commercialized two products globally on 5 of the 7 continents, SWFSource.NET a .NET-based Flash SDK, and Empower an ASP.NET web content management platform.
  • Responsible for marketing, customer acquisition, local and national consulting sales and international product sales. Developed initial sales and customers to launch the company without outside investment and cash-flowed the business within the first month.
  • Consulting Projects
    • Migrated a Microsoft Access/Visual Basic (VB) 5 application to .NET 1.0/1.1, C# and SQL Server 2000 for the nation’s largest puppy broker. The purpose of this project was to optimize the dog pedigree area of the business, improve performance and allow for future growth. The result was a complete ROI after 5 months in production.
    • Migrated a home-grown Microsoft Access CRM database to ASP.NET 1.1 for a global skate park developer. The purpose of this project was to allow global sales reps to collaborate and access and modify live customer from a browser.
    • Developed public web sites for businesses in banking, manufacturing, engineering, business and civic organizations, automotive retailers, book publishers, magazine publishers and clothing retailers.

Web Developer/Programmer (1998 – 2001) Hook Up, Inc., Joplin, MO

  • Developed a dynamic web site product that provided heavy-duty truck dealerships with the ability to create a web site and manage the content for their dealership, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Classic ASP 2.0, VB 6, COM+, MTS, T-SQL and SQL Server 7/2000. This product also provided the dealerships with a system to publish truck inventory to their searchable dynamic inventory web site.
  • Developed an eBay style heavy-duty truck auction. The system was built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Classic ASP 2.0, VB 6, COM+, MTS, T-SQL and SQL Server 7/2000. The auctions provided truck buyers with the ability to bid on trucks through the live web auctions. The instrumentation and logging for the system allowed our customer service team to see errors and issues instantly and call the truck buyers immediately to assist them with their problems.
  • Designed the hookup.com logo and designed the look-and-feel of the public web sites.

Owner (1996 – 1998) JoplinNET, Joplin, MO

  • Founded and operated a regional web design firm that provided web design, development and internet marketing services for small to mid-sized organizations in southwest Missouri and the surrounding four-state market (Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma).
  • Designed and developed static content-based web sites using Adobe Photoshop, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
  • Developed ecommerce shopping cart web sites using the Cart32 ecommerce platform.

Skills Overview

Leadership – Extensive experience leading a team to solve challenging problems with innovative solutions. Visionary that is passionate about technology, business, marketing and entrepreneurship. See and understand the big picture of an organization and their business and can communicate and clarify the organizations vision and strategy to others in an understandable fashion. Empower, motivate and inspire others to rise to a challenge and make great decisions to continually drive business results. Encourage and commend team members to improve and develop new skills.

Management – Self-motivated and goal-minded manager that communicates with team members regularly to achieve profit-oriented business goals. Provide personal development opportunities for team members to constantly improve and enhance skills. Monitor project status across team, challenge team members and hold team members accountable to commitments. Provide team members annual performance reviews to reward them for their great skills and achievements as well as challenge them to develop and improve their weaker skills.

Architecture – Experience architecting client-server, component-based, n-tier, layered, service-oriented (SOA) and message-oriented system architectures.

Application Design – Experience designing and implementing object-oriented (OOAD/OOD/OOP) applications using design patterns and best practices including Gang of Four (GoF), model-view-controller (MVC) and dependency injection (DI) through inversion of control (IoC).

Development and Programming – Experience with Microsoft.NET Framework 1.0/1.1/2.0/3.0/3.5/4.0 and the base class library (BCL), C#, Windows Communication Foundation 3.5/4.0 (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5 (WF), Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5/4.0 (WPF), Entity Framework 3.5/4.0, ASP.NET 1.0/2.0/3.5/4.0, Windows Azure, BizTalk Server 2009, SQL Server 7/2000/2005, SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 (SSRS), SQL Server Integration Services 2005 (SSIS), Visual Basic 6, Classic ASP 1.0/2.0/3.0, JavaScript, VBScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), HTML, browser Document Object Model (DOM), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XPath, XSLT, Structured Query Language (SQL), Transact-SQL (T-SQL), COM+ and Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) using Visual Studio (VS) 6/.NET/2003/2005/2008/2010, Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2008/2010, SourceGear Vault, Visual SourceSafe (VSS), CruiseControl.NET (CCNET), MSBuild, NAnt, NUnit, MSTest, NDoc, StyleCop, FxCop and NCover.

Database Design and Administration – Experience with Microsoft SQL Server development and administration including hardware and OS configuration, installation, schema design and normalization, key design, query performance optimization and index tuning, security administration, development of stored procedures, views and triggers, debugging production performance issues using Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Manager 7/2000, SQL Server Query Analyzer, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2005/2008.

Server Administration – Experience installing, configuring and managing Windows NT 4, Windows Server 2000/2003/2008/2008 R2, Internet Information Server/Services (IIS)3/ 4/5/6/7/7.5, BizTalk Server (BTS) 2009, Active Directory (AD), DNS, DHCP, Exchange Server 2000, Operations Manager (MOM) and Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA).

Communication – Extensive experience with written communication targeting business executives, technology executives, potential customers, software developers, IT team members and non-IT audiences. Have experience creating technical documentation (Use Cases, User Stories, Business Rules, and UML diagrams), user documentation, marketing content, best practice guidelines, presentations and sales communication. Also have experience with verbal communication and public speaking to business executives, customers, team members and user groups.

Business Analysis (BA) – Experience gathering business requirements and collecting information from end-users by conversing about technology projects in language understandable by the business users and customers.

Project Management (PM) – Experience leading and being a member of agile teams using SCRUM and Waterfall project management methodologies. Have experience scoping projects, developing project charters, estimating time and cost, managing a product backlog, scheduling tasks using Microsoft Project and JIRA.

Certifications and Memberships

  • Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): .NET Framework 4, Windows Applications (WPF)
  • Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): .NET Framework 4, Data Access (Entity Framework)
  • Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): .NET Framework 4, Web Applications (MVC 2)
  • Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server, Administration
  • Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP): .NET Framework 2, Application Development Foundation
  • Scrum.org: Professional Scrum Developer (PSD)
  • Wisconsin .NET User’s Group
  • International Association of Software Architects (IASA)
  • Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS)