My Life’s Journey

Education

I have studied Philosophy at the University of Toronto in the early nineteen-nineties because I wanted to understand the big picture, I wanted to know “why there is something rather than nothing” or “what makes a man different from a machine”; in those days this branch of philosophy was called ‘Philosophy of the Mind’ sometimes also referred to as Artificial Intelligence. Due to the AI in my resume I am getting headhunter calls and emails to this day but, of course, the AI I studied back in the day has nothing to do with what is called AI today because as with most concepts in IT the terminology and vocabulary are very imprecise and misleading.

​While I still don’t know the answer to these big questions I was forced to move to more mundane things in life such as making a living and since there were no jobs for philosophers I branched out to something quasi-related namely Information Technology.

Corporate Career

​My first job was at very small company developing software for the financial industry, specifically for wealth management and retirement plans. While there I could observe and learn first-hand many of the worst practices in IT starting with having no clear understanding of the purpose of the software, no detailed understanding of of any of main business functionality, no understanding of who the users were and what they needed. This was compounded by ad hoc selection of the software platform, database, programming language and tools, megalomaniac owner who thought he knew better than anybody else and who also understood that even bad software can be sold for a lot of money with a proper  sales presentation. While the software never worked I learnt later after I left that the business idea worked out great, the software was sold for a handsome price to a well known financial institution which promptly scrapped it.

​I learnt two lessons from this engagement: 1) How software development should not be done 2) Sales and Marketing are independent of any underlying product. I tried to take the first lesson to heart and be as professional as possible but ignored the second lesson at my own peril.

After this I have moved to HP. HP in those days was still one of the best companies to work for in the world, the perks even for employees starting out were unbelievable. But those were the golden twilight years and within a couple of years the company would loose its way which is the case to this day.

At HP I was doing a junior PM work within a year. But I found out that management and PM work involved mostly endless phone conferences often about the same things over and over again and so decided to stay on the technical side of IT rather than pursue managerial track. That’s why I still work with my hands so to speak.

The next stop for me was Morgan Stanley, the second biggest investment bank on Wall Street at that time. In those days investment banks worked smarter then the rest of the economy. One of their secrets was technological simplicity; their technology stack had four main components; one global file system, C++ for real time processing, PERL (the best overall programming language ever in my humble opinion) for everything else, Sybase data container. This simple stack enabled this global data-driven company to run thousands of systems, jobs, websites at mostly 100% success rate on a daily basis. No other company I ever worked for came even close to this type of efficiency.

After MS I ended up working on a project for Canada Post. And here I got a second lesson in life in how bad technology selection in the beginning can affect the whole subsequent project. The project was to create a central data processing and distribution hub for CP. The project was sold to CP as a complete package involving the latest corporate technology based on Java available at that time in the form of Glassfish server and Netbeans IDE. It was new ambitious but unproven technology. It looked good and paper but in reality it forced me and my colleagues numerous times to reinstall Netbeans just to be able to continue our work (container technology was not yet available). This was likely Sun’s last attempt to transform itself from a hardware manufacturer to an enterprise software provider before it was bought by Oracle.

Consulting Career

​Inspired by Canada Post project I struck out on my own hoping to develop what Canada Post data hub project didn’t deliver, an enterprise-strength text-based data processing system. This started my independent consulting business which this web site represents as a side-project to keep me afloat while developing my pet projects.

While the enterprise data system did work and fulfilled its initial specs I couldn’t find a buyer or an investor since I didn’t really learn the lesson #2 at my first job, namely that sales is independent of the quality/utility of the sold product.

I have been contracting ever since but am not opposed to a full time gig if something interesting came along.

I have worked on the open-source SAP-type e-commerce system called Ofbiz. Companies spent millions on e-commerce systems without ever realizing that there is an e-commerce platform that supports numerous e-commerce sites from a single installation and integrates with numerous suppliers, payment and delivery providers out-of-the-box.

I developed an enterprise back end data testing system which was based on my enterprise data processing system for FundSERV. In those days there really was not a enteprise-wide comprehensive back end testing system. This was a new paradigm in testing and FundSERV was at the forefront due to its development manager. But as is often the case the projects go the way of their managers those who pushed or created the project. When the manager goes the project is gone in short order.

I re-architected and re-engineered an ETL-type system for RBC improving the system throughput 10 times and being on track to improve it 100 times before my contract was ended due to lack of funding by the upper management.

I worked shortly at Sunnybrook Hospital on a POC to convert the back end of their custom EMR to NodeJS API.

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