I joined Texas Lone Star Lending in 2003 to launch a commercial finance division to complement our residential lending division. I have since then taken responsibility for business operations, compliance, and marketing. I manage all day-to-day operations of the business, including employee relations, budgeting and payroll, and contract negotiations. Regulatory compliance is a major concern for mortgage companies. I authored and maintain all of the company’s compliance documents including a “compliance map” that maps laws and regulations to our internal processes that implement them. Our compliance library includes, among others, a Security Policy to comply with Gramm-Leach-Bliley and Federal Trade Commission and Federal Reserve Board (FRB) regulations, a Quality Control Plan to comply with HUD regulations, and an Advertising Policy to comply with State law and HUD and FRB regulations. I also authored a Loan Process manual that provides a step-by-step guide to loan origination and processing for our employees.After joining the business, I developed a marketing plan to identify marketing targets and strategies for reaching them. Mortgage companies such as ours have two primary targets: real estate agents and past customers. I designed brochures, postcards, and other materials for both targets and created processes for reaching and following up with them. I also designed and developed our corporate and internal (Intranet) Web sites. Both are hosted on a shared Linux server running Apache. I used a combination of HTML, Perl, and JavaScript and open source tools to create a rich customer experience on our public site and a well-developed loan processing system on our Intranet.

I was hired to manage a development team of eleven. Much of this team had been together for better than two years, developing more than one million lines of quality C++ code. The software was feature-rich, but it was buggy and hard-to-use. We took the first year to redesign several important aspects of the software, including the critical billing module, and remove the bugs. In July, 2002, we had a very successful product release, moving all but one client to the new version within a month. This was a notable achievement given the significant redesign of the data model that required converting each client’s database. Part of this success was due to installation and use of a product issue tracking system and the adherence to a process for product development and release that I authored and instituted. In my second year, we designed an optical module targeted at opticians that we successfully released in spring 2003. I also began the process of training my development team in software process. We used formal technical reviews to design the optical module, and when I left the company, employees were leading their own projects.

LuLu Technologies was a Web software and Web site design company. My responsibilities included software development, marketing, sales, and business management. The company developed 3 products.LuLuWorld was a system of software used for the development and display of Web sites. I was responsible for the design, programming, and testing of this software. The software combined Java and Perl with open source tools to dynamically generate Web pages.LuLuWorldTM ECommerce was a transaction-processing module of the LuLuWorld software system used for electronic commerce Web sites. I was responsible for the design, programming, and testing of this module. It included a product catalog generator, a shopping cart manager, and a payment processor. It also provided sales analysis and customer service tools.Managing Your Practice was a PC-based, practice management database system for the medical profession. I was solely responsible for all aspects of this project, including design, programming, and testing. It handled patient records and accounts, insurance claims filing, and scheduling for medical offices.

I worked on GeoFrame, a Unix-based, integration platform for the company’s oil field, data interpretation products. My responsibilities included writing and maintaining object-oriented code used for data access. The data access layer was written in C and C++; the underlying database was Oracle. This project required sound software methodology, and I participated in the design and deployment of that methodology.