Visionary software architect and engineer specializing in data interoperability and artificial intelligence.

I discovered I was a software developer / engineer / architect while working in my first tech job as a software test automation specialist for CorTechs, Inc. I was on a supposedly short training gig at the "Mashantucket Piquot Tribal Nation," also known as "FoxWoods Casino & Resorts," in Connecticut, where I discovered immediatly that I was in a proper pickle: the Mercury sales people who sold them $250K worth of test automation tools didn't verify that the Terminal Emulator add in actually worked with the customer's terminal emulator, which they were not willing to change. Somehow I cobbled together a bridge between the emulator and WinRunner with the add-in, writing C++ DLLs and a kind of debugger that allowed me to implement about 65% of the HLLAPI interface required for basic record-replay simulation.

It took me a few months, but I saved that account for Mercury, and from that point on was much more interested in coding solutions to hard problems than merely testing. While still at CorTechs, I eventually created an almost-patented approach to "gray box" testing that allowed unit test-level "white box" data to be obtained during functional regression "black box" testing by patching the running memory image of the application with "probes" written in a superset of C using debug information. It was intended to become part of the Mercury Suite - WinRunner, LoadRunner, etc.- so we called it ProbeRunner.

Since then I've had many opportunities to expand my skills and even had a chance at Apex Data Solutions to build a data federation platform for the VA that became known as VistA.js, named after their famous EHR that they keep for some reason trying (unsuccessfully) to kill. Our project was just about to go to national roll-out when they halted all VistA-related development to try to transition to Cerner, on the theory that just using the same software as the DOD would give them interoperability (which they didn't have with 135+ instances of VistA running at all their medical centers, but I digress). $13B dollars later they appear to be giving up on that, and accepting VistA's continued existence, again. Anyway.

My superpower is synthesis: getting two things that ought not work together to behave as if they were one. I am also a polyglot, in real human languages as well as programming languages.