How long have you been with WinWin?
I began working part time for WinWin in October 1997, one month after the company began. I joined full time in April 1998.

What is your background?
My education is in Physics and Mechanical Engineering. I worked for various engineering companies and ship building companies for several years, first designing nuclear power plants, later working in estimating and contracts for large construction projects. I was introduced to RevG in 1984 and used the tool with immediate success.

I continued on with Revelation products for several years. In 1995 I joined a SQL / Powerbuilder project team. I found that the analytical approach I developed using Revelation made me one of the more effective SQL developers. However, I was frustrated by the inefficiencies of the SQL client server environment of that time and was happy to rejoin the Revelation community in 1997.

What is your current position/Title at WinWin?
Senior Developer

What is your favorite thing about working for WinWin?
My favorite thing about working for WinWin is the people I work with and the people I meet. Revelation has long been a product used by interesting people to do interesting things. I enjoy an amazing variety of assignments at WinWin; every day offers a new and different challenge.

What project(s) are you currently working on?
I split my time among several projects, some related to upgrading the Revelation product, some involving second level support to other consultants, some direct programming for my clients. I recently completed a RevG to OpenInsight conversion in the U.S., implemented a Winsock based distributed computing application for a client in Africa, and wrote an OpenInsight to Microsoft Word interface for another U.S. consultant. I have been involved in testing and improving the OpenInsight for Linux product and the OpenInsight connector to Universe databases. Like all WinWin employees I spend time performing customer support too.

During your time at WinWin, what has been your toughest project?
Some of my toughest assignments at WinWin involved interfacing with other products. These assignments predate the recent improvements made to OpenInsight, my favorite development tool. I used piles of VBScript to accomplish the task. The latest upgrades include strong support for embedded OLE components, so that the same assignment would be much easier today.

How do YOU gauge success?
WinWin is a customer-oriented company, so I measure success in satisfied customers.

Customers are just people who need help with a problem. Often they do not fully understand their problem or the full extent of the help they need. Solving this customer’s problem is a journey toward a goal, rather than a single step to the answer. I consider myself to have succeeded if I keep the customer involved for the entire journey, and leave them smiling at the end. For some people this is a fifteen minute phone call, for others it is a multi-year, multi-phase process.

What do you do to keep your creativity level at its peak?
My coworkers would laugh at this one. Being uncreative is the challenge for me. One of my favorite situations was solving a reporting problem for a customer a few years ago. They needed to integrate Crystal reports with an OpenInsight Database without using the OpenInsight ODBC driver. I just read about this new idea called XML and thought it might help. In four hours I had a working XML data-warehousing tool, which let them provide Crystal Reports to their client, and clinched a sale. As a bonus, we found errors in the Crystal reports XML driver, which they fixed at our suggestion.

How do you keep up with what's going on in your industry/profession?
The web is my main source of technical information. I read a lot of industry newsletters. If I find an article, which interests me, I often follow up by searching on relevant terms to see what else I find. Finally, providing technical support keeps me in touch with what other developers are doing. Often resolving a technical support question leads to learning a new technology or technique.

What outside interests do you have?
I live in Maine, so my outside interests are truly outside. Biking, Hiking, Sailing and Skiing are favorites.