My Story

My passion for computer programming started when I was just 13 years old with a Texas Instruments TI99/4A, my first personal computer. I spent hours thumbing through the BASIC programming book and copying the sample code. I would experiment with code changes and re-run the program to learn all of the different methods and properties of the BASIC language. Fast forward just a few short years and I was paid to write a price lookup program on a Commodore 64 for an acquaintance who owned a small business. I was paid $75 for the application and, with that, Dausware™ was born!

My college major was, of course, Computer Science where I was taught on an IBM mainframe using COBOL and Assembler. At the same time, I was teaching myself Microsoft Visual Basic on my PC. I continued my entrepreneurial ways by offering to help friends and family with their small businesses by automating their processes through custom applications. Sure, I got paid but it was pennies on the dollars per hour and I was OK with that… I was doing what I loved to do… writing software applications to fulfill a need or solve a problem. Through the years I continued to be self taught - in much the same way as I had with the TI99/4A - learning .NET, ASP, SQL Server, C#, JavaScript, and others.

My career officially started in healthcare where I was on the software development team that wrote drug dispensing software (think of an ATM machine for drugs). We were a small team of full-stack engineers that released the first generation Windows version of a system that was deployed in thousands of machines in hundreds of hospitals. I took any opportunity I could to visit clients for installs and upgrades, and relished hearing their story of how our system helped their business and bottom line.

From there it was onto securities, stocks, and options where I was a development manager and player-coach for four front-end order entry and analytic applications. Thousands of brokers, account managers, market makers, and traders processed millions of transactions daily through these systems and they needed to perform. While our applications were good, they could have been more efficient. Milliseconds counted and I was driven to shave as many as possible off of every code module. A lot of blood, sweat, and even some tears later and a number of the key components were streamlined and much more efficient than they had been.

Having a successful career so far, I tried my hand at self-employment and created Dausman Technology. As the principal, I consulted companies who were looking to automate their business processes. My services ranged from basic Internet web sites to complete CRM and ERP systems to manage clients, subscriptions, invoices, payments, etc. For one client, millions of dollars in revenue was processed completely autonomously.

Being a consultant gave me a perspective into client relationships and customer support. I loved software and creating systems, but I wanted more… to provide enterprise solutions to hundreds or thousands of clients. So I sold my business and moved back to corporate America.

I rejoined the corporate world as a software development manager of a small handful of enterprise SaaS systems. Like the order entry systems, these applications needed performance help. Rather than take on this gigantic task myself as I had done previously, I coached and mentored the software developers on best coding practices, good design, and how to write good quality programs that are maintainable.

My management recognized my accomplishments and skills as a leader and I was promoted to a role in operations where my teams managed the deployment, maintenance, and support of our production applications. Security was paramount, so the first order of business was to establish processes and procedures for secure deployments. In cases where the team was manually editing or managing files, this was automated to eliminate the risk of human error.

The success I had in operations was again recognized and I was given the opportunity to lead multiple teams in professional services. My associates included developers, trainers, project managers, implementation specialists, and portfolio managers. As in my previous roles, when I arrived the team(s) were in a bit of chaos with little or no structure, formalized processes, or KPIs. For me it was rinse and repeat to standardize our processes and to begin to measure, track, and report all of our metrics. Needless to say, efficacy was achieved through change management where and as needed.

So, what happened to my passion for software engineering? It still exists and I continue to keep my hands in code as appropriate. One thing that I have discovered is that I get as much, if not more, gratification from mentoring, building, and scaling teams to design, build, and deploy amazing software solutions as I used to do.

That's my story,