Hi, thanks for stopping by.  This site is my attempt at describing who I am so that anyone that I work with can better understand me, my motivations, my passions, and how I think.  It has been extremely difficult trying to keep an online presence across the multitude of social networks so I wanted to try a different approach by having a single website be the road map to everything else that is “me”.

The most important thing to me is my family, they are why I’ve done everything that I have throughout the years.  I try to give them the best life possible, to be there for my 2 daughters, Ashlee (1990) and Sophia (2007), my grandson Fynn (2016), granddaughter Kaia (2019), and my wife and partner Christina.

I recently came upon this word while trying to articulate an inherent trait of mine.  Looking back over my life at many situations and experience I was able to find a common theme.  I am always trying to fix, make better, and enhance.  I like the term “enhance” because to me it does not presuppose that something is bad to start with, just that something is made better.

I will attempt to “enhance” anything once I know about it.  This will usually just occur in my mind but will occur 99% of the time none the less.  If it’s an app on my phone, a video game, a movie, a product, a technical process, or even the way a person talks, I will look at it in this light.

If you are talking to me about something and I appear a little distant I am probably trying to improve on the thing you are talking about.  When talking about a product I might, in my head, try and improve the product, improve the process of developing the product, improve the marketing about the product, etc.

I view the enhancing of something as the means to an end, that end being the user or consumer of that “something” being more effective in what they do.

I began my entrepreneurial journey back in 1987 with a friend of mine.  We created a software development company called CSS, Custom Software Solutions. We were going to write programs for doctors’ offices, mom and pop VHS rental stores, and for whomever else would listen to us.  We ended up creating a program to help a steel worker’s company, and another program to help a commercial contractor’s company.  Since we knew nothing about business our “company” didn’t go very far so we gave it a rest and went our separate ways.

In 1997, after working as a fulltime software jock for a few years, I stepped out of the supposed security of full time work and into the risk of consulting / contract work as “BaSys Inc“.  Looking back over the years many people told me that this endeavor would’ve been too risky for them.  I never truly saw the risk in it as I always had confidence in myself, my skills, and my ability to make things happen.  You can read the full story of how I went from full time employee to business owner here; “Work History”.  When I started BaSys I was a was basically an hourly contractor.  I was able to change my business model in 2007 and move to a more fixed price model, but was still in essence an contract employee as I only ever had 1 major client.  I was able to bill out other resources under the BaSys umbrella but was always just trading time for money.

I am currently on a mission to change my business model and to change the way that I help companies.  My goal is to help as many technology based companies as I can with their software and IT projects.  I believe that the more effective teams can be in delivering software to customers the more effective the customers can be by using that software.  By speeding up the process of discovering the right thing sooner a company can decrease operational costs while also increasing customer satisfaction and retention.  This has led me to create my latest venture; “Optimal Efficacy”.  For this new venture I am going to charge fixed prices for well understood results, no more time for money.  I am looking to be more of a partner, adviser, and expert leader to the organizations that I want to help.  I feel that all of my years up to this point have given me the skills and experiences that I need to make this happen.

For my side hustle, I also own and manage a couple vacation properties.  The risk involved with purchasing and marketing the properties made me nervous at first but I attacked it the same way I attack everything else; head on, customer focused, and based on data. My properties are located here on VRBO… “Bonita Springs, FL“, “Ocean City, NJ“.  I never realized that I would actually enjoy dealing with the guests, nor did I realize what impact the guests would have on me.  I find it extremely satisfying and fulfilling to read a good review about the guests experience, to read a kind word from a guest about me.  A recent guest sent me a thank you text after his stay, including a picture of his smiling wife and daughter.  This made me feel like I added something to their lives, like a made a contribution.

I have been an avid gamer since I first got my hands on pong.  I have been playing video games on consoles since 70’s, starting with the Atari 2600, and currently on the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.  I’ve loved arcade games like Congorilla, Punch Out, Star Wars, Galaga, and any pinball machine.

A few years back me and a friend of mine created a social gaming site, Kindred Gamer.  We wanted to create this site to help those looking to play online multiplayer with like skilled and minded players, a “looking for groups” site but with more of a social aspect.  When Microsoft came out with their integrated “looking for groups” functionality on Xbox live this kind of fell to the wayside.  I still think about this site and have some ideas about resurrecting it in the form of a dating site for gamers.

In 1983 I saw the show “bits and bytes” on PBS with my father and have been hooked ever since.  In 1984 my father finally bought me a computer for my 15th birthday.  I begged him for months and this was a huge deal for our family because of the expense.  After many discussions with a friend of mine I told my father I wanted a Commodore 64.

I have no formal training outside of high school and have been able to learn all that I have needed on my own.  I started out using Borland c, C++, OWL to build character based programs and Microsoft VB 3, C++, MFC to build GUI programs.  These programs were used on touch screen devices, quite a feat circa 1996.  These programs also involved real-time PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) integration, DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) IPC (Inter Process Communication), and deep knowledge of win32 and win32s.

I continued on with Visual Basic through Microsoft VB 6, MVC, C++.  I built MSMQ services, data access layers, Active-X documents, COM+ components, and visual layout user interfaces.  I think I even dabbled in classic ASP at this time for an inhouse incident reporting system to track issues with the software we were building.

I eventually moved on to .net / C# and have been working in .net since version 1.1.  I have built many, many incarnations of console apps, services, and web sites.  I have written frameworks to encapsulate the complexities of multi-threading, sql server, message queing, windows services, unit testing.

I have been working with Microsoft SQL Server since version 6.5 and have written a multitude of stored procedures, functions, views, and scripts.  I have been doing DBA work for longer than I can remember and have been responsible for backup / restore policies, deployment policies and procedures, and for schema source control.

Several years back I picked up the web technologies like javascript, typescript, angular, jquery, html, and css.  I have written angularJs apps, Angular 2 / x apps, jquery apps. I have created deployment processes for web apps, continuous integration scripts, continuous deployment scripts, unit testing fixtures, etc.

The evolution of tools, languages, frameworks, and standards will never end.  I take solace in this and know that I will be able to work as long as I want because there will always be the need for computer programming.