Resume

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In a Nutshell

I'm an adaptable, versatile and entrepreneurial generalist with a very good command of written and oral English, and experience in a broad range of IT activities from programming through business analysis and project leadership.

Profile

I began my career in Information Technology following graduation from the University of Toronto. I was initially hired as a programmer, but was promoted into increasingly responsible positions, including those of programmer/analyst, systems analyst, senior systems analyst, and project leader.

My employers have included large, respected organizations, among them Prudential Insurance, The Molson Companies Limited, Xerox, and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

I later moved into a consulting capacity on projects that required both business and technical skills and which exposed me to a wide variety of technologies and industries. I believe I communicate well, am detail oriented, thorough, conscientious and bring a degree of intuition to the technical aspects of any job, an intuition which often can only be obtained through hands-on experience. Although documenting is anathema to many of my peers in information technology, it is an activity which I thoroughly enjoy. I implemented a wiki at my last client site to simplify and facilitate the production of project-level documentation.

Organizations for which I have worked as a consultant include Baton Broadcasting, TD Canada Trust, The Canadian Bankers Association, Daimler-Chrysler USA, Panasonic Canada and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

One of my interests has been in using technology to improve my own productivity, whether it be through the use of open source project management applications, test case management and defect tracking, or through the creation of tools to improve the quality of my work. While IT people focus on building software for end-users, I believe they sometimes miss the opportunity to consider ways to automate their own repetitive tasks.

I'm motivated by consulting opportunities in which I can participate in all phases of the software development life cycle.

Currently

In 2009, I finished a series of consulting assignments at a software development company whose specialty is supply chain business process automation and integration in the retail and consumer packaged goods markets. I completed the last of four .NET applications for a major client of the software development company. The successful development and implementation of the first application, which won a Retail Council of Canada award in the supply chain category, led to further business from that client and some of their business partners. Another .NET application that I developed under extremely tight deadlines for a major consumer electronics retailer has led to a host of new opportunities for my client from that retailer and its partners.

I also led a testing team for a web-based, government-targeted payment processing application.

Since then, I have worked on a number of smaller projects. Those projects include automating critical database backup integrity checks via program code, enhancements to a generic .NET payment portal and the creation of a GST (Goods and Services) web application using a PHP development framework.

Skills and Qualifications

My years of experience in IT have exposed me to system development methodologies, database design, business systems analysis, system architecture, project leadership/planning, proposal preparation, documentation and training, testing, implementation, and coding.

I am comfortable working on my own, as well as on both large and small development teams.

My most recent experience includes the heavy use of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and ASP.NET/C#-based application development using the Visual Studio .NET 2008 IDE. Database conversions (from Oracle and SAPDB) were also part of that work.

I am very interested in keeping abreast of a wide variety of development environments. I am comfortable, for example, with PHP scripting and MySQL database development. Further, I have experimented with other environments, including, but not limited to Django, Ruby on Rails, and a variety of PHP and ASP.NET development frameworks that are based on the MVC architecture.

Written Work (Samples)

I've picked the following two items at random.

The first item is an excerpt from a document (requires Adobe Reader) outlining for an international consulting firm an approach to migrating from a Macintosh to a Windows environment:

The second document is an excerpt from a proposal for an interim employee time capture application:

Details

I have had a varied career in both large and small environments and have omitted some smaller projects to keep this resume to a manageable size.