Steve Poling Email & Phone Number

I work when it's interesting. Money is less important than helping people. I've worked at some of the best companies in Grand Rapids. Writing software well is a real joy. I am interested in how Software Engineering can become a serious professional discipline and the methods for most effectively organizing the work. I developed software using the "waterfall" but I got over that foolishness when I learned I'm not God. This started me prototyping. Now I think that "wicked" problems and changing requirements mandate an agile approach, but not cowboy coding. Exactly how we engage a problem is mandated by that problem. If it is completely understood and unchanging, a BUFD waterfall is optimal. Otherwise an emergent design via agile is indicated. I am interested in the concept of "technical debt" as a metaphor for communicating the trouble that we borrow when development cuts corners.The catastrophic behavior of avalanches is another apt metaphor for a poorly curated codebase.My current favorite metaphor is the phase change: solid software has solid interconnects, gassy unstable software has weak, ill-defined interconnects. This is like the phase changes of H2O from steam to water to ice. Good software will have internal connections that are strong enough to make the system solid, but not so inflexible as to make it brittle.Specialties: Cryptologic mathematician, speech recognition, digital signals processing, artificial neural nets, digital typesetting, financial software, object oriented development, test driven development, agile methods, functional programming

Listed skills include Agile Methodologies, Tdd, Oop, Speech Recognition, and 24 others.

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  Senior Technical Consultant

  Excelon Development, Llc

  Oct 2018 - Present - Greater Grand Rapids, Michigan Area