About

I currently work for a manufacturing company and have been there since 1998. Over the years I have had various roles and positions including: Manufacturing roles, Production Scheduling, ERP Implementation, Business Process Engineer, IT Manager, and Systems Architect.

I have had interest in technology for many years and have always tried to "make, act, and do". I have been experimenting with programming since my teens when I used QBasic to do math homework and tweak games such as Gorilla.bas. I still like to take on little programming puzzles....

Lately I have been playing around with the Raspberry Pi..... this website is actually hosted on it.

The variety of roles I've had over the years has left me with a mix of skills including:

• Production Scheduling - Finite, Capacity Planning, Queuing Theory, etc
• Lean Manufacturing - Value Stream Mapping, Continuous Improvement, PDCA, Fishbone Analysis, etc
• Inventory Control - PFEP, Bill of Material, Purchasing, etc
• IBM iSeries - DB2, Performance Management, Work Management, etc
• IT Management - Team development, technical planning and budgeting, project management, etc
• Business Process Management - Current State Mapping, Future State Design, Monitoring, etc
• Programming - RPG, CL, VBScript, VB/VBA, PHP, Python, etc
• Web Technologies - Linux, Apache/Nginx, HTML, CSS, REST, etc
• Industrial Control - Serial interfacing, marking systems (printing/labeling), etc
• Integration - ETL, B2B transactions (EDI like), etc
• Reporting/Analysis - Knowing what to look at and how to get it

These skills have allowed combining various disciplines in many of my projects. Things like; production control systems that integrate tracking with inventory management and industrial marking, a configurator that integrates inventory setup with production routing and bill of materials, automating processes with simple custom systems to replace paper workflows, and performing analysis of business units/departments/processes while gaining an understanding of the core issues often as well as the domain experts in those areas.

Much of my free time is spent researching various technologies. When not doing research, I enjoy spending time with my son, often sharing with him details about various low level technical topics. We also enjoy:

• Gold Panning
• Video Games like Minecraft and the Lego series
• Pizza and movie nights

I love to learn as much as I can, and consume information on all sorts of topics. Sciences like chemistry and physics are two of my favorites, I enjoy the historical aspect of many of the events that relate to them. I also read many books on technology in my free time, books on programming languages like the O'Reilly Animal series,books on design such as Beautiful Code or Beautiful Architecture, and some more complex ones like The Art of Computer Programming.