Ted's done a ton of projects over his career. These are some of them; details are deliberately left vague to protect client confidentiality except where clients have given explicit permission to link. Have a look and see if any of these seem similar to what you might be looking for somebody to do for you.
A software development tools company in Sweden was finding that their tool wasn't gathering the kind of developer "mindshare" they'd been expecting and/or hoping to obtain. They needed to hone their message more tightly, revamp their approach, and engage with somebody who could help them penetrate the noise around developer tools.
Fledgling startup in Southern California needed some help finishing off an MVP for their startup around a mobile application that, when paired with a custom-built Bluetooth sensor, aided doctors in potentially life-saving diagnosis.
The company was facing a pivot point in their history--what steps should they undertake to move from the current position using the underwhelming set of tools they had evolved over time, to position themselves for a new generation of growth and customer service?
The company had reached a point where their competitor was taking their customers away from them and carving out huge chunks of a market they used to dominate. They needed to figure out what was wrong with their development process, their tools, and/or their people.
Seven school districts in the Pugent Sound area needed to be able to exchange student records with each other and the State of Washington in a more timely manner; what used to take months needed to take days or even hours. The solution was to use an open standard and some Scala running on Heroku to create a "pipeline" of processing that could be modified and extended as new needs arose.
The company was having some difficulties incorporating their local IT with the corporate IT strategy, along with some technology direction issues around their use of .NET, mainframes, and a few things in between. We helped sort out the direction and give them a new path forward.
Large (Fortune 500) company struggling with application development advancement was looking for ways to improve their software quality. As part of their overall request around improvement, they asked for a proof-of-concept demonstrating how to leverage automated testing tools around both their WebForms application and a (separate) WinForms one.
As the CTO of the company, I was responsible for the growth of the team (from zero developers to close to twenty at last count), the delivery quality of the teams, technical mentoring and growth, and establishing a company culture based around autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
As the CTO of the company, I was asked to develop the initial MVP for the site, and helped get the company off the ground. Since we were a new startup, I was also routinely asked to participate in funding meetings and startup pitch meetings.
I am guest faculty for the University of Washington, teaching graded courses on a variety of software development topics to the undergrads as part of the iSchool curriculum there.
As part of the first-generation "Try F#" web page, Microsoft Research retained me to build a Silverlight component that would host the F# compiler within the browser process. This way, the compiler didn't need to reside on a network server, made for faster discovery of type information (necessary for things like IntelliSense in the browser), and allowed for better in-place REPL experiences.
Providing architectural guidance to a distributed team of over 100+ developers creating a multi-tenant enrollment platform. Work closely with for development team to document best practices for development and unit testing. Project used C#, ASP.NET MVC, Workflow, Entity Framework, Moq, Unity (with custom extensions) and SQLServer 2012.
I write, record and produce training classes for an online educational company; these courses are intended as replacements for traditional in-classroom/on-site corporate training, and are meant for the corporate environment.
I teach classes (C# at this point in time) at Bellevue College here in Seattle. Students come from a diverse set of backgrounds, and they leave knowing a lot more about the language and the platform than just what's in the curriculum.
Providing architectural guidance to a distributed team of over 100+ developers creating a multi-tenant enrollment platform. Work closely with for development team to document best practices for development and unit testing. Project used C#, ASP.NET MVC, Workflow, Entity Framework, Moq, Unity (with custom extensions) and SQLServer 2012.
Worked with management, architects and senior technical stakeholders over a three month period to develop and deliver SOA assessment upon which was then engaged to provide actual work using recommendations. Architected a baseline platform for mission-critical services which are heavily utilized by company employees and clients. Leveraged TIBCO, C#, OData (via WCF) and open standards in achieving the project goals of performance, extensibility, interoperability, and maintainability.
Provided an assessment of the current technology platform for developing next-generation tax applications and services, and then coordinated eight different teams architecting portions of the recommended platform, and collating the work into a final architectural vision for the division/company. Work utilized technology all across the .NET technology ecosystem.
Led effort to demonstrate feasibility of moving client projects from private Java production data center to Windows Azure cloud installation. Java application used servlets, JSPs, custom tag libraries, JDBC and MySQL database; finished prototype used Java on Azure, using SQLServer on Azure for data.
Asked to deliver an Android implementation of an iOS "photo scavenger hunt" game using a SharePoint back-end (via JSON/HTTP) for a marketing promotional effort at a SharePoint conference. Delivered in 2 weeks, concept to Google App Store.
A large pharmaceutical company was considering acquiring a smaller startup company, and needed a due diligence done over the software they would be acquiring. Interviewed the developers and management staff, reviewed the codebase, conducted architectural and key component code reviews, wrote up a final report and presented the findings to both companies.
Client was engaged in building software control system for experimentation rig to control optic nerve experiments. Development was in C# (though we considered F# for a long time) and accessed HL5 data records. Named "Symphony" for its ability to essentially orchestrate experiments and capture the results, it was later open-sourced. It is in use in several research institutions, with gratitude from the researchers who are grateful to use something written in this millenium.
Asked to consult with performance analysis product company on a comparison of the Java and .NET ecosystems; how they compare, both in terms of technology and market tendencies. Provided custom training materials and consultation services.
Company was building a first-of-its-kind hospital asset management application for the Android platform and Motorola Droid phones. Application involved Java and the Android 2.1 SDK, using camera, Internet, and both local and remote database functionality. Application prototype was developed in weeks, and a first version within months.
Fortune 500 firm was examining options for enabling .NET client-side application to interact with Java server-side services. Internally, the company had chosen WS-* web services, but client wanted second opinions and alternatives, since the WS-* services seemed heavyweight and tedious. Work consisted of examining all options, providing three potential solutions, developing prototypes of each, and preparing a final report that examined pros and cons of each.
Company was engaged on 150-person project building kiosk software for the purchase and disbursement of public transportation tickets. Project was in danger, and new CTO wanted a complete review and analysis prior to any overhaul of the project as well as recommendations on how to bring the project back from its slipping deadlines, missed functionality and poor morale. Conducted interviews and analysis, wrote report and presented it to the CTO, and project later shipped successfully.
Client, makers of a popular multiplayer racing and vehicle customization game, wanted to create a second title around a different theme and utilizing more back-end server support. Provided server consultation around performance of connection and scalability, and assisted with some of the back-end development (in .NET).
Client wanted to build a new brokerage for transportation providers and consumers--essentially, providers selling space on their railroad cars and big-rig trucks could find those seeking space upon which to ship various goods across the country. But they wanted to do it in such a way that there was no predetermined bias of platform or language, which meant they wanted to build it on top of open standards and formats.
City government IT department needed some mentoring of its developers around some advanced .NET development concepts, then later (as other project deadlines loomed and required additional unforseen development bandwidth) asked to simply develop the project for which the mentoring was intended. Taking XML data fed by traffic cameras on city arterial streets, developed a Windows service to validate, transform and store the data into a database for later geospatial analysis and display in near-real-time.
Company makes software that runs on computers installed in mining equipment, and needed some analysis and consultation on the communication infrastructure (CORBA) used to communicate between the various machines as they move in and out of network range. Analysis centered around bandwidth concerns and the on/off nature of equipment moving in and out of the network and what that does to disrupt existing technology.
The university was looking to replace their existing accounting system (custom-developed in conjunction with another university from the Midwest, using a 4GL popular at the time, but impossible to support today) with a new, from-scratch system built in Java. They needed an architect, they needed an architecture, and they needed a team lead to guide the rest of the team into the new millennium. We developed a custom workflow engine, utilizing JavaScript as the language for expressing state-machine-based workflow, built in Java, using Swing as the front-end and storing to the original RDBMS schema for backwards-compatibility purposes.
Company was looking to develop a new way of conducting scientific research, involving heavy mathematical computation based on data stored in an Oracle database. Leveraging the capabilities of the Oracle 8i database's new "embedded JVM" feature, we built the system to carry out the scientific data analysis from within the database itself (writing the math code in Java and loading it into the database for use from within an Oracle Java Stored Procedure), enacting a significant time savings.
Client was about to roll out new functionality for their mobile phone subscribers (measuring in the millions) to allow for custom ring tones for callers to hear when waiting for a subscriber to answer their phone. Client was very concerned about the scalability of their EJB-based solution, as it was not reaching any of their performance or scalability benchmark goals. When finished, the application met every single SLA with flying colors, and client rolled out with zero issues.
Firm was creating an application development platform and tool around making it easier to do "business rules" within applications written in Java (putting the rules front and center in the development, rather than embedded in business logic written in a programming language, which is harder for subject matter experts to describe and verify). Generated application code was being deployed to EJB application servers, and firm needed some guidance around the EJB development and deployment model to correct for some performance and scalability issues. Project was cut short by funding shortages after 9/11.
New product vendor in the telecom space sought to build a platform for rapidly developing vertical applications for the telecom industry, and needed additional engineering effort on the core infrastructure of the platform. Worked closely (pair programmed most of the time) with the Chief Architect of the company on a wide range of features across the infrastructure, including implementing referential integrity within their repository on top of an OODBMS, reverse-engineering and correcting bugs found in the application server platform (WebLogic) used for the platform, and handling versioning and deployment of applications deployed through the platform. Java, EJB, Swing, WebLogic, and a whole host of custom-developed infrastructure (including some code-generation tools and components for the other developers to use).
Firm needed some expertise around cross-platform communication using CORBA across a variety of partner firms--the existing services were not meeting performance or scalability SLAs, and even before v1 had been deployed there were issues with extensibility and versioning of the services. Worked with architects from several major firms to establish IDLs that worked across the collective, and defined them in a more performance- and scalability-friendly manner.
Developers seeking in-person/on-site training on various technologies would schedule classes with DevelopMentor asking them to send an instructor, or would purchase seats in one of the four open enrollment centers the company owned. I write several courses for DM, taught all of the Java curriculum, most of the .NET curriculum, and wrote several white papers for them (for marketing purposes).
Private corporate spinoff of state student aid association needed to reboot a failed software project. Led team of 3 other developers, taught them Java, servlets. Architected and developed custom view framework to simplify and ease page development. Completed project development in 7 months' time with total team size of 4, implementing what 25 developers couldn't deliver in 2 years.
Client wanted a proof-of-concept of building PalmOS applications before committing to multi-million dollar development effort. Application needed to connect across the Internet while docked, communicate with desktop, sync data from multiple sources, and provide a custom application on the device. Based on prototype results, client went forward with the project and rolled out successfully a year later.
Company required a communication "bridge" implementing mainframe communication protocol over serial port (COM) connection and transforming it into OSF RPC calls to another server running on Sun hardware. Written in C++, running on Windows box (as required by product requirements) as a headless Windows service. Complete product lifecycle development, from conception through deployment to production and maintenance handoff.
Worked as technical lead for a "Rapid Systems Solutions" (RSS) team for Fortune 50 company. Led development efforts on numerous projects using and extending rapid internal Web-based application development. Utilized ColdFusion, NetDynamics, Java, Oracle.
"Fax-back" software product development for small company. Refactored file-based database access layer to simplify development. Worked directly with marketing, sales, and engineering leads to implement product features. Provided support to technical support staff. C++, MFC, Windows application utilizing specialized communication hardware.
Developed product features for call-center application written in C++ and Borland OWL talking to Oracle database. Implemented fax capabilities into product. Solely led effort to transition the Windows application from 16- to 32-bit Windows. Added numerous custom framework enhancements and features.
Implemented product functionality for well-known personal financial management software product company, using C++ and company custom C/C++ framework for Windows application. Also did some technical expertise consultation involving C++ cross-platform compilation across Windows and Mac OS.
Implemented product functionality for startup building a product in the manufacturing management software space (challenging SAP) using C++ and XVT (a portable UI library) and Tools.h++ (a portable low-level implementation library). Added numerous custom framework enhancements and features.
Published on 25 August 2013