Personal

 I guess I should talk a little about my self and my history on this page since that is the purpose for me building it.

So to start out I was born September 26, 1976 in Illinois, and raised in the south Chicago suburbs in a town called Sauk Village. I started collecting comic books in 1988 about with Transformers comic books, and then moved on to collect Spider-man comics. I built my first program not too long after that to track my comic books using Visual Basic 1.0, using at the time using the latest version of Access db available (1.0). I updated this program though out high school to suit my needs for keeping track of my comic books.

  I finished high school in 1995 (being the Last Class of Trail Blazers) and went to Illinois State University that fall to start my freshman year. During my freshman year in collage I put up my first version of my website, part of it run on the campus web server and the other half run off my dorm room computer. This is also the same time I started helping out in a chat room called #kids on Dalnet an IRC server network. And this is the time when my nephew was born to my sister and husband. Four years and an internship later I received a bachelor’s in Applied Computer Science: Information Systems.

  I did my internship at a small dot.com company called NoGimmie’s which folded in a whimper with most of the rest of the dot.com flops. After that I went to Boston Mass to work at another start up company started by one of the people who worked at NoGimmie’s. I stayed there for about 9 months, but this company also could not gain any steady traction so I left and headed back to Chicago, to be closer to family and work as a consultant. I worked as a consultant till just after Author Anderson imploded and the job market in Chicago for consultants dried up.

  So I took a job offer I turned down the first time while I was still in Boston and moved out to Tampa bay Florida to a company originally called “IOUMONEY” and which later it changed its name to Commflo. I did the initial conversion of the prototype website that was done in Cold fusion and using Microsoft Access database to a one using Microsoft Dot.net 1.0 and Microsoft SQL server 2000. I turned over the finished Commflo website over to the staff that was going to maintain the site and left Commflo to the company which I am currently employed.

  I started at RoboDocs in November of 2002, converting there classic asp website (vbscript) to a Dot.net website (C#) that was able to scale and run much faster on the same hardware.  The company has changed a few times over the years, and gone though a few names (RoboDocs --> LoanDocSolutions --> GoDocs).  The company was sold and the new owners have done a good job so far in providing support that we have needed, beefing up the staffing and support.  So I am still working for the company in 2024 and planning on continuing to do so.  I know its scary, I been with the company for over twenty years as of writing this.

When I started I was the website developer, which turned into the website developer/ sole IT guy for the small office for about 18 years .  I moved from doing the website coding, into coding the website, database, and HotDocs template system.  And later on creating our own template system from ground up to replace HotDocs and make the system completely web based.  Eventually we as a company were able to hire more staff, which includes developers, and IT personnel to expand the offerings we could offer, currently at 9 developers. So I moved back to being a senior developer position and turned over the IT role to the new IT staff (phew).

I am currently working on refining the GoDocs website and updating the template system to keep up with the law changes that happen in the United States relating the commercial real estate loans. And with that brings us into the present. 

With the my new status and changes do to Covid, I am working from home and no longer need to be close to the office for IT response needs. This has allowed me to move back closer to family in Indiana, and to buy a house across the street from my sisters place in 2022, which saves me from having to fly home on holidays to visit family, which is great in my opinion. So for the first time in nearly twenty years I am now paying a mortgage and not paying rent which feels great. And once again updating this site.