Project Examples

The following is a list of some of the many projects that Darryl has been hired for, to give you an idea of the sorts of challenges he has handled. Each of these were genuine projects. The names and details were removed to protect the innocent.

Rescues

Client spent many, many millions of US dollars on a desktop application, which was over 1 million lines of code. The application would not run performant on the end-user machines and investors were becoming restless. Darryl developed a solution to the problem using a method that everyone had written off as impossible. While he was at it, he also single-handedly removed 400,000 lines of code with no loss of features or functionality.

Client's server farm was hacked. The hack was targeted (not a robo-hack). Data was deleted and held for ransom (not ransomware). Darryl participated in the response the same day. He discovered the attack vector and orchestrated its closing. He participated in developing an ongoing plan to mitigate subsequent attacks.

Client hired a team to develop a new database system. After many months and a lot of money spent, the team was excised from the project. With a now-reduced project budget and a large chunk of the schedule consumed, client was dismayed. Darryl was invited to finish the project using the remaining project budget. Where the original team needed a project manager and development staff, Darryl single-handedly completed the project in the same amount of time and even starting over.

A company lost the source code to a major piece of software that it owned. The software was originally written in non-obfuscated Managed C++. Darryl successfully disassembled the binaries and re-composed working source code -- even converting it all to C# in the process.

Client had built a large database system. Thanks to company success, the load grew to millions of transactions per day. Eventually, the load became too great and they started seeing database timeouts which ultimately caused major outages. After a while, the developers could not keep up and the situation became dire. Important customers threatened to leave and the company feared for its existence. Darryl was hired to root cause the database timeouts and correct them or make a very specific list of code changes for other developers to work on. In real-time, he also orchestrated daily sessions with the operations teams to respond to in-the-moment database outages. Ultimately, the problems were all fixed and he even participated in infrastructure consolidation project to lower operations costs.

and more...

Technical Assessments

Client had been licensing a web-based LOB application for a number of years. Initially, feature requests made by the client were handled quickly by the vendor. Over time, the feature requests were handled less and less responsively until one day, the client wondered if they should buy the vendor's source code. Darryl was hired to review the source code and make a buy vs build recommendation.

Client had hired an outside firm to create a prototype. Eventually, the prototype was put directly into production against recommendations. The prototype had architectural limitations that made production usage problematic. Darryl was hired to assess the level of effort required to rebuild the prototype as a full production application.

and more...

Full Stack Web Developer

Python, .NET, JavaScript -- and even Pure C

Created a SPA using React, Reflux, PostgresSQL, Python back-end

Implemented a Python Django mobile web app. Implemented a Django forms site as an LOB solution.

Created a high-load web application using Python, PostgreSQL, Flask, Nginx and uWSGI

Created multiple LOB web applications using ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, old ASP, really-really old ASP and SQL Server

and more...

Database Projects

Client sought to replace an aging database system from the 1990's. Darryl orchestrated the implementation of Microsoft SQL Server . He migrated the data to the new database system and re-created the front-end. Client also wanted some of the business processes adjusted, so Darryl lead design sessions where the client, together with Darryl, re-designed the database screens.

Designed and developed a GIS application to overlay oil and gas wells information and perform geospatial queries. Systems included Microsoft SQL Server and ESRI ArcIMS .

Designed and developed a data warehouse that received 20 million transactions per day using Oracle

Created a data migration script ( Python ) to move data from File Maker Pro (Windows) to Microsoft SQL Server as part of a server modernization project. The script performed many data cleaning and normalization tasks.

and more...

Embedded Microcontroller Firmware

Participated in the from-scratch creation of a new piece of firmware. Darryl created the initial boilerplate for the project. Afterwards, he stayed on to answer questions and provide direction for the on-going development. C and C++ . The micro was a Kinetis K20

Repaired the build system for a piece of hospital management system firmware. The processor was an MCS-51 clone, the Philips 8051 .

In order to accommodate radical new features, Darryl totally recreated an entire firmware program. Also created a from-scratch simulator, a battery of in-code unit tests, remote firmware updater tool and much, much more. Firware was Pure C . Project took 2 years. The micro was a PIC-18

and more...

Marketing and Sales

Implemented SuiteCRM, Salesforce, SugarCRM as well as Custom Developed CRM solutions

Implemented customer login systems, customer profile, customer license code and entitlement tracking.

Implemented operational systems to analyze CRM and POS data and propose course correcting actions.

and more...

Low Voltage Electronics

Helped assemble several demonstration rigs involving an MCU, high and low voltage relays and an array of low voltage devices.

Created a small switch box to simulate a police car's light bar, siren, brake pedal and more.

Co-developed three (3) data collection devices and handled wiring some of the electronic sensors

Setup long-running performance tests as well as environmental tests against hardware.

and more...

DevOps Projects

Implemented Jenkins, TFS, NuGet and Octopus for automatic builds, deployment and various other internal tasks.

Implemented both an Azure hosted and On-Premises Microsoft Team Foundation Server . After running it for 3 years, migrated the team to Bamboo . Setup build agents on both systems. Created complicated build scripts to perform tasks such as Build, Unit Test, Deploy, Stage and Archive builds. Educated the team in effective ways to manage branching in TFS and also in git .

Implemented Jenkins and Subversion for manual builds and special batch jobs

Implemented gulp for compiling a node.js project

Created NSIS installers, RPM installers, MSI installers, updaters etc for all major platforms including Linux, Windows and Mac

and more...