We are on a mission to help people reach their potential.Currently we are focused on helping small businesses hire the right people... as this is is now and will always be one of the most valuable parts of any business as well as for every current and potential employee.Next up; we believe the best way for businesses, teams, and individuals to reach their potential is by slowing the revolving door of hiring and focusing on retaining, developing, and growing the people on your team!We do this by having the most values-based environment possible. We are Kind. We foster and celebrate the psychological safety and courage needed to Speak Up and Step Up. Our special sauce... the thing that differentiates us from any employer you've ever had is our deliberate and genuine interest in helping all of us Keep Growing. We do all of this while Working Together and Winning Together.Sound interesting to you?Hit me up and let's chat!

I love Indianapolis...I love Software and Product...I love the HiTech community here in Indy... they are definitely "My Tribe".IndyHackers' goal is to bring the community together. We work with/help meetups (it is hard, and we are here to help)...we help facilitate mentorships...we play a role in the "Talent/Opportunity fit" with our job board...we run two major events per year (be on the lookout for the 2017 Summer Slam ;-) )...We host a Slack community (https://indyhackers-slack.herokuapp.com)We help keep the city informed, with the best newsletter you could subscribe to (http://indyhackers.us6.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=244b5370d41b5cf4146ec517c&id=b51f983563)We are a group of volunteers with the single mission to connect and empower the hi tech community here in the good 'ole Nappy City (Indianapolis) :-)

During these years, the company ARR grew by 5x, I served the product and engineering team togrow by 4x, all while re-establishing a product and engineering culture full of modernpractices and systems to foster continuous improvement.● People: I’m most proud of the culture of growth, continuous improvement, trust, andpsychological safety that we evolved during these years. As the executiveresponsible for growing the software team within a software company, I’m also veryhappy with not just the growth we were able to attain, but how we attained it. Weimproved the diversity, aspired for a great and unbiased candidate experience, andbuilt employee-praised onboarding.● Process: During these years we evolved from a project and output focusedorganizational design to the empowered product team model (working towardsbeing ever more outcome focused).We also overhauled our internal support of customer facing teams by creating asquad dedicated to not just responding to the escalations and requests from oursupport and services teams, but their prime directive was to reduce the need forescalation to begin with. This improved our overall efficiency, lowered the total costof ownership, while improving the customer experience.● Product: In 2018, we introduced Lessonly’s second product called Practice. We wentfrom supporting almost exclusively the SMB market to bringing on seven-figureenterprise customers (which included becoming SOC II certified where weintroduced the concept of a fully automated AWS-powered private cloud for physicalseparation for enterprise customers) in 2019. In 2020, we also introduced adedicated strategic partnership squad as well as began the creation of the thirdLessonly product, named Skills (slated to launch early 2021).

Formstack is a fantastic organization made up of fantastic people, with a fantastic culture, and a fantastic product.I will forever be grateful of the time I was able to spend with this crew.

My time at Emplify is a "two story" tale.Some other accomplishments I'm proud of:* Every quarter, we took an employee engagement survey company wide, and all three quarters that I was DoE, the engineering group scored either highest or top two in the company.* I helped usher in a new engineering and product delivery culture with the help of some of the most talented co-workers in my career.* We were able to transition to a modern product organizational design, where we had small cross-functional autonomous teams. * We transitioned from a deployment strategy that was full of stress and confusion, to a "release train" and continuous integration strategy. Increased confidence and fewer bugs were the result. With continuous integration, we introduced code constantly into our master branch, and had the confidence to let that code go to production even when the feature set wasn't complete (Feature Flags FTW!!).* However, the thing I am most proud of are the six engineers that I had the honor of leading during my tenure as Director of Engineering. Their individual technical growth, increased customer empathy, & all around team camaraderie the engineers grew into to be specific. I'll be forever in their debt for the incredible lessons they taught me on our crazy journey.Near the end of my tenure with Emplify it became clear that my passions were split between product and engineering & it was best that someone lead the engineers that had a more singular focus. So, I helped the new DoE onboard while I tried out a pure Product role.In my short time as Product, the accomplishments I'm most proud of were my proposals. One was a "problem-based" roadmap with built-in Alpha, Beta, and General Release states. Clear definitions of how each department should interact with the functionality in specific states.Though, the time came were the "Talent/Opportunity fit" was clearly misaligned and I needed to move on, I will always cherish my time with this amazing team.

I first want to give major kudos to the entire team during my tenure here. What we were able to accomplish, given all of the obstacles we had to overcome, makes the main project during this time, one of the proudest moments of my career.My time at OH started off with nearly a year of me being the only software professional on the team. I focused almost exclusively on creating a system that took in claims files, and ultimately ETL'ed them into a OH-specific domain model and a custom reporting solution that integrated five disparate data sources.The next year was the most exciting. During this year, we had to build a software team, build a product that was good enough to replace the existing portal, and finally migrate all of the clients over to the new platform. All of this, while attempting to put the organization through an "agile workshop"​. I decided to push us heavily in the direction of agile, because, I felt it gave us the best chance at success. I played the role of product manager (I had spent a lot of time with primary business users of the previous app, which gave me unique insight into what needed to be delivered), project manager (given the fact that no one had agile experience within the organization, I had to use many different techniques to successfully implement this philosophy) and tech lead.After the successful completion of the most intense project of my career to date, I was given the incredible responsibility to be interim CTO (leading both software and IT). I can't express in words how grateful I am to my team during this stressful time. It took all of the effort and focus that the team had to give. We pulled together, and made it through with very little downtime, even though a tremendous amount of technical "know-how" (the previous CIO had a direct hand in building every phase of IT) was no longer with us. Overall team morale and OH executive leadership team confidence in the work we were doing stayed at a high level during this time.

First, and foremost, I absolutely loved being a part of the incredible DevTown-inspired Indianapolis startup community (I will always be honored to have called myself an Associate Partner / Townie). I was a big fan of what DT was doing, who had the privilege to actually work within the system I idolized. I had been trying my hand at Venture Technology since 2007 (4 years at the point in which I became a townie), and because of my (non-tech) experience in this area, I was a clear fit.The technical fit wasn't as clear however. I had never been a mobile developer, nor did I really know any Ruby on Rails. But, my love for startups and the mission of empowering entrepreneurs that need technical expertise, fueled my desire to learn these technology stacks.I was trusted with leading and completing 2 versions of the Kiwanis family of iOS and Android mobile applications built with the Appcelerator Titanium abstraction platform. My experience with agile and general project management allowed me to hit the ground running on leading this project. The second version had a Rails backend API we needed to build in order to automatically update the Kiwanis club locations (which were locally stored on the device in a SQLite db).Though, I was on the mobile team, there was a need for a developer on a web project. I started as a developer on a three developer team. At the end, I was the product manager / project manager and team lead of a team of developers and designers. I organized, and ran all of the client engagement meetings with the client. I was responsible for helping with business strategy and overall technical direction.Other note-worthy experiences from my time at DT consist of learning much more about the business side of startups, learning a proven approach of being cost-conscious while still delivering tremendous value, as well as experiencing multiple examples of agile successes.

There were many interesting aspects of my time at ExactTartget. Starting with the interview process. Fusion was having a difficult time placing people at ET, because of their very high standard and expectations of Javascript expertise. If it weren't for me deciding that I needed to learn more finely controlled user experience techniques during my build out of BbyBk.com, I wouldn't have been able to pass the technical part of the interview.However, I did pass, and was placed on the Xpress Marketing team as a UI developer. I learned many advanced UX/marketing tactics during my time here. I used everything from jQuery, Server Side Javascript, REST APIs, Git, advanced CSS techniques, etc.The final aspect of my time at ET that is note-worthy is that I was given the responsibility of deployment manager. My background as the lead of many of the teams I had been a part of, made me a prime candidate to take over deployment duties. It was a bit unusual to have a consultant run point on a very involved deployment process, but I was able to complete all of deployments I was responsible for successfully (though not without a bit of excitement during the one I had to complete with my manager [the only other person that knew the details the of deployment process] on vacation).

During my time at Fusion, I was entrusted with the projects/placements that were outside of the core competencies of Fusion because of my diverse background. It was a very rewarding and enlightening period of my career.

3DG was the company that I used to house many of the purely entrepreneurial ventures that I was involved in. I played the role of Chief Venture Technologist and focused on product and project management, customer relationships, and providing the highest quality solution possible across multiple units of measure (including, but not limited to; application performance, venture ROI, and overall effectiveness).Venture Technology is my answer the age old "motive" issue associated with normal relationships between technologists and business leaders. All of the motives behind the status quo relationships are flawed. Regardless of if it is contracting, consulting, or even full time employment. Venture Technology means that the technologist is invested in the ultimate success of the business...not just the perceived success of the project, or the perceived successful output of an employee. Venture Tech focuses on the most important part of any venture...delivering the greatest impact so that the business can achieve sustainability, which will allow it to deliver even greater impact (and so on, and so forth).When I became a DT townie, I decided to focus all of my energy on that endeavor and shut down all of the businesses I had started within 3DG (as identified in this blog post: http://unfadingpursuit.com/the-great-merger-of-2011).The projects within 3DG included but was not limited to a SEO-focused eCommerce platform, a system that strived to improve upon the ability to manage gas station back office processes, and the crown jewel was an app whose sole purposes was to empower busy parents to chronicle the development of their children while also capturing the experiences of being a parent. Within all of these projects, I played the role of product manager, software engineer and business development specialist in varying degrees depending on the project. We had to navigate business strategy pivots, shifting markets, and figuring out inbound marketing techniques.

ChaCha Underground which is the the backend reporting system for the ChaCha 'Guides', needed to have partial internationalization (i18n) implemented because of the business migrating to areas with different currency values. This was the first time attempting Ruby on Rails professionally. I was selected because Fusion trusted that I had the experience with so many other platforms and languages, and could "figure it out". Even though it was slow at the start, I was able to deliver on the business objectives on-time and on-budget.Tech: Ruby On Rails (1.8.7/3.0 respectively) mySQL HAML YML Rails i18n Dev Env: Git (GitHub) / Subversion / NetBean / Ubuntu 10

I played a critical part in the training and development of a team of classic ASP and client-server VB6 developers into an Object-Oriented .Net C# web development crew, while leading the project delivery process.This was when I began to realize that my career as a software engineer / software architect was transforming into more of a project management / product management strategy direction. I was nervous about leading a team...I was nervous about implementing a relatively new concept of agile development...I was nervous that I wouldn't get the same fulfillment that I lived for when I saw someone using the result of code that I wrote with my own hands.I was pleasantly surprised when I got a much more intense internal positive response from seeing the members of my team grow technically and in the general skills associated with delivering excellent software. I was astounded that I was more proud of the software we built together....much more than I felt even when people used software in which I built myself. This was when I learned that my calling was inspiring and leading a team, and not so focused on my person technical skillset. I had a vision of what QA should look like, what the business analysts should be doing on a daily basis, and how best to work with the infrastructure team.I loved this, and I will forever be grateful of my time here, because it showed me what I should be focused on.Ultimately we migrated from classic ASP and VB 6.0 windows forms applications into C# and VB.Net web applications, web services, and windows forms applications. ProTrans has many systems integration projects because of the many different standards that they have to interface with, therefore they have adopted a Service-Oriented Architecture to aid in these types of projects.

The web development team was migrating from Visual Studio 6.0 and VS 2003 using VB 6.0 and .Net 1.1 respectively to using VS 2005 using VB .Net / C#. The web and app servers were being upgraded from Windows 2000 Server to Windows 2003 Server using IIS 6.0. The overall development style was being converted from a procedural methodology and a non-normalized approach to database design to an object-oriented methodology which includes 2nd and 3rd normal form database design. I was responsible for and involved with many key aspects to the initialization of the overall redesign, including:• Re-engineering the Visual SourceSafe database structure to incorporate labeling techniques as well as other industry standard source control management practices• Implementing a repeatable (and less error prone) build and deployment process that includes rebuilding from source safe and deploying to the Model and Production environments• Analyzing the different data access methods including using typed datasets, Microsoft’s data access application block, as well as documenting and leading the discussion of the benefits of using an ORM tool such as LLBLGen Pro, EntitySpaces or nHibernate.• Helping in the education process of the teams overall paradigm shift towards object oriented development, normalizing databases, and using C# and the .Net 2.0 framework• Maintaining current “Production” VB .Net source code while identifying and improving on inefficiencies and errors within the code• Converting the web applications, windows services, batch processing applications and class libraries from the .Net 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks to the .Net 2.0 framework• Assisting in the transition from the Windows 2000 servers to the Windows 2003 servers (including assisting in the effort to implement a load balanced solution and configuring the web servers) • Creating unit, web, and load tests using the Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers suite of automated testing tools

Software Engineering Consultant (Java, PHP, AJAX, C#, and VB.Net), that specialized in being an "ice breaker" (a special subset of the consultants that were trusted to be the first "of us" at a new client...we had to not only excel technically, but with the interpersonal communications ability to represent our organization and prove that we deserved to be more involved with the client's software processes).

The Risk Management and Compliance Interactive Web Solutions Project needed to be built on an extremely agile platform in which development requirements where continuously changing, while still facilitating the need for production-quality data. This system was built with PHP 5 using Smarty Templates to separate the View/Presentation layer. Extensive use of PHP 5’s object-oriented functionality was utilized to abstract out the Model/Business Logic layer, while more traditional PHP code was used to control the user-interaction. A collection of PostGres7.4 databases where used for data-persistence, with ADODB being used to facilitate the communication between the code and the database. Andrew was responsible for key milestones in every stage of the development lifecycle of each web form, including:• Requirements gathering (direct client interaction)• Designing 3rd Normalized Form, Entity Relationship Diagrams• Implementing the ERDs into a PostGres 7.4 database• Architecting a framework using MVC/OOP design patterns and RUP/Agile software development methodologies while educating co-workers on the advantages of these techniques• Developing structured object oriented PHP code• Implementing “standards-based” presentation that is W3C HTML compliant• Enhancing the user-interaction by introducing Web 2.0/AJAX techniques such as utilizing CSS and JavaScript which includes employing the use of the XMLHTTPrequest object for asynchronous data retrieval and communication with server-side scripts.

The Conseco Leads Administration project is an enterprise web application that is being used to facilitate the administration of the lead marketing process. This process allows marketing organizations and their nationwide marketing agents to be efficiently informed about and associated with certain prospective customers. This association is automated based on specific key marketing attributes or manual assignment of specific prospects. The system also gives the user the ability to effectively organize and manipulate many other aspects of this process. The Leads Administration system was an enterprise Java web application built on the ATG framework and developed using IBM’s Web Sphere Application Studio. CVS was used for version controlling. The data for this project was acquired from a SQL Server database using a stored procedure API of over one hundred stored procedures. Andrew was responsible for key milestones in every stage of the development lifecycle, including:• Requirements gathering• Writing Use Cases• Creating an HTML Prototype as a proof of concept• Organizing the database API as well as other project administration documents• Development of JSPs as well as Java code

Andrew’s primary responsibility at pan was to translate sections of their corporate web site from a static display to one that is dynamically populated. They have over 500 tests, each having a description page which is displayed in one of four separate areas of their web site. Each area had a separate folder structure and a different .htm web page for each of the tests. Consequently, there were over 2000 .htm pages in four different areas. This structure made enterprise-wide maintenance and standardization nearly impossible. Andrew solved this problem by developing a system that uses ASP pages to dynamically display each test and its description in the appropriate format by pulling key information from a SQL Server database. Andrew’s other responsibilities at pan included:• Analysis, design, and documentation of the conversion from the old “static” system to the new “dynamic” system• Modifying XSL reports per customer requests• Maintenance of the core pan technologies, which included modifying ASP pages, SQL Server database objects and some Jscript front-end interfaces

Griffin Analytical Technologies was looking for a versatile intern that could handle a wide variety of tasks. Since they are a small company, the software engineering department was also responsible for all of the I.T. work including but not limited to desktop troubleshooting and maintenance, server maintenance, and any other computer-related issues that arose in the office. Andrew was directly responsible for much of the desktop support issues, as well as modifying and expanding on the verification and testing procedures for the software iterations by creating manual test scripts for regression testing. The main software application that Griffin was developing was a desktop application written in Visual C++. Visual Studio .Net was used as the IDE, Visual SourceSafe for version controlling and Visual Intercept for defect management. During Andrew’s time at Griffin, he was responsible for reporting over 60% of the software defects submitted to the Visual Intercept system, and fixing the code for over 40% of the total defects found. Andrew also worked on adding features to the software that required the integration of code from other applications, and making the functionality fit within the standards of the Griffin application.Andrew’s Responsibilities at Griffin included:• Modifying and expanding on verification and testing procedures• Testing, reporting, and fixing defects within the application• Desktop support and maintenance