During my college years, I wrote a BBS game called Galactic Wars (see here) which was similar to the old Solar Realms Elite BBS game.  I designed and developed my own asynchronous communication routines, as well as an internal ANSI driver and designed the algorithms of the game. 

My first venture in the shareware world was for an application called FAE (see here).  It was a file area editor for PC-Board and Celerity BBS software packages.  I have a lot of fond memories of this project as it was my first fairly large development effort. 

For this project, I wrote routines for reading the content of a wide variety of archive formats, as well as high speed routines for batch processing record based files.  I also wrote the manual and help files.  At the time, I used to joke around that FAE stood for Fast and Excellent.  This of course, irked authors of competing products but they could not deny that my application perfored batch operations much faster on a 286 with my software than theirs would do on a 486 machine!

Another personal project that I wrote was a database front-end for a shareware CD collection.  I had purchased a collection of categorized development files on a CD and the gimmick was the company would sell databases that contained descriptions of items on the CD's.  Their application to search the database was not very user friendly, so I reverse-engineered their database and wrote my own interface which I later sold back to them for use on their CD!

Just to demonstrate how it's a small world... One of their other customers saw the user interface I had built for the CD collection and approached me to develop an application for them.  This application was a front-end for a coop advertising database.

Another contract job I did was with a small company that specialized in helping people find appartments.  The application allowed the company to maintain a list of appartments that were available for rent as well as a list of potential clients and what they were looking for.  This allowed them to match appartments to these potential clients.
I also wrote and released an ANSI file viewer appropriately called ANSIVIEW (see here).

My first real job in IT was with a company called Mediatrix Peripherals.  When I started with the company, I was responsible for technical support for the Audiotrix Pro sound card.  Eventually, my role was expanded to participate in the development that was being done internally.  This was a fun job where I could justify playing games for half a day and be able to make the claim that it was in order to test compatibility of the games with our product.

Among the fun projects that I worked on at Mediatrix, I designed and wrote the front-end software for the Audiotrix Pro Effects Processor daughterboard (see here). I also designed and wrote the front-end of an IP phone application used with the Audiotrix Pro IP daughterboard, a generic DOS installer, as well as a Windows Sound Recorder.  

I then moved on to work for Crain-Drummond which has changed owners a couple of times since I left.  They were a printing company.  I developed a variety of software for them such as an online customer requisition tool, a production tracking system, a factory estimate system as well as an internal software request application.  These applications were my first taste in working with SQL databases.

A few years later, I joined HMS Software.  A small company specializing in timesheet entry software.  During my time there, I achieved a lot of good things.  I took on project management responsabilities for the migration of TimeControl from a client/server application to an n-tier platform.  I architected the new version of the product as well as it's distributed objects engine.  I developed a solid and very extensible object-oriented framework that allowed a lot of reuse of code.  I also went on-site to visit some of the companies largest clients.  I stayed there for close to 4 1/2 years and that is the place where I have grown the most in my career.

My next tour of duty was as a contractor for a year with Manpower Professional.  I worked for one of their largest clients on a 911 emergency dispatch system.  During my time there, I worked mainly on fixing defects in the product.  I interviewed potential hirees, led and participated in code reviews.  I also participated in analyzing customer inquiries before they became defects.  I also wrote some data mining tools for the defect database in order to generate statistics of individual and team performance.

Currently, I'm a software developer at IBM.