I have a passion for software and a passion for seeing small business owners and non-profits succeed. I have combined those passions and partnered with my brother Stephen on Level X Technology.It's our goal to use Level X as a vehicle to help small business owners and non-profits be more successful by automating manual processes that currently bog them down.

I am a founding partner and handle all development.eSee Acuity develops and manufactures digital acuity charts that are easy to use and most importantly, affordable. There's no need to pay upwards of $3000 for one of the other digital acuity charts on the market when you don't need 90% of the functionality they contain. See https://eseeacuity.com for an affordable, easy to use alternative.

FIS purchased Clear2Pay. The name on the paycheck changed, but the job did not.

These days, I spend most of my time as a project lead. It's a position that some might call a technical architect. At any given point in time, we are running projects for numerous Top 50 financial institutions, and you can find me leading one of them.At C2PA, project leadership entails the technical aspects of shepherding a project from the very start (gathering requirements on site with the customer) to the very end (handing the keys to the customer). This results in numerous visits to the customer throughout the project lifecycle, heavy analysis and design (including the production of design documentation and technical specifications), and mentoring the team’s development staff. And I always make sure to afford myself time to do development, as well. I’m quite good at it, and it has always been my first love.My tenure at C2PA has given me a passion for the entire development lifecycle. I have grown out of my adolescent “development rock-star” years into a more mature software engineer. I now realize that being good at this job means more than just writing quality code, fast. It means understanding customer requirements. It means understanding how QA operates and interacts with development. It means being able to produce a lasting design and properly estimate how long it will take to build it. It means interacting with a project manager and/or delivery manager to make sure that person can do his/her job as effectively as possible while also allowing you to do yours. It means figuring out the most efficient way to test the application (I’m an automation freak, by the way). It means holding the customer’s hand throughout the process and reassuring them that you have their best interests at heart (it also means having their best interests at heart and helping them understand what their best interests are when they sometimes do not). Oh, and it also means writing quality code, fast, which I still love to do.

As employee number five (and the first technical hire) at a fledgling Clear2Pay Americas, my early responsibilities ran the gamut from developer to IT to sales assistance to new office scout to project leadership.I have arbitrarily carved off my first three years at C2PA into the early (read: pre-customer) years. During these years, I was mainly responsible for putting together demos for the sales team to present to prospective customers. These demos were less smoke and mirrors and more scaled back versions of our product. There were no PowerPoint demos here. The demos were built using our real platform, and many of the demos were later enhanced into products. I quite often accompanied the sales teams on trips to present the demos, as well.I was also the IT department during this time. Given that we had less than 20 employees, this was less than a full time job, but it afforded me the opportunity to learn a great deal about how to set up an effective IT infrastructure. Because my day job was as a developer, I was able to utilize my development knowledge to set up an IT infrastructure that was developer friendly while still fulfilling the needs of the company at large.One of the side-effects of my early time in IT was that I was able to roll out a Maven-based SCM infrastructure that was easy enough to use and maintain that even a developer could do it! Some of this was out of necessity; we couldn't afford a full-time SCM person. (And yes, I realize that I'm blending IT and SCM here, but cut me some slack... we were a small company, so lots of roles were blended!)As the company grew (read: gained customers and therefore was able to hire people), I transitioned to a more traditional team lead / architect / mentor / java developer role (that’s “traditional,” right?). I have carved that out as a separate position. Conceptually, it kind of was, but I really only did that because LinkedIn told me I wrote too much.

I'm not sure why I broke this out as a separate position. I did more of the same stuff as before, just harder versions of it. And I did said harder things from North Carolina instead of Georgia.

No one really cares what I did this long ago, but if you really must know, it involved building stuff using Java. And there was a portal (remember when those were cool?).