Tony Bibbs, Helping Build Better Software Email & Phone Number

West Des Moines, Ia

GForge delivers Comprehensive, Simple and Elegant collaboration. We’ve leveraged nearly two decades in project management and software delivery and distilled it to a complete set of tools that helps our customers run better projects. GForge provides project management (milestone planning, issue tracking, document and knowledge management) as well as features specific to software delivery such as version control, pull requests, and sprint planning and continuous integration in a one minute install with simple pricing.I got my undergraduate degree from the University of Northern Iowa, my “MBA” working up the IT chain and my “PhD” when I quit corporate life to help guide GForge. I’ve set aside, yet leveraged, my technical experience to expand into strategic planning, budgeting, product management and evangelism in our products and company. I’m an outlier, an enigma that’s still capable of failure at any moment. That keeps me focused on doing the most good for my family, our customers and our company.

My love for technology will never be confined to my "day job". Throughout most of my career I have been involved in a number of consulting projects which eventually lead me to form an LLC. Under this LLC I strived to compliment my fulltime job by:Built the online community, Iowa Outdoors, which focused on hunting and fishing in Iowa. In 2007, After growing the site to over a quarter million page views per month, I sold it to Heartland Communications who acquired the site to compliment their already impressive print, TV and radio interests. It has since been rebranded as the Iowa Sportsman, though, the technology is relatively unchanged.For over seven years, The philanthropist in me contributed to a number of open source projects including Geeklog, Propel and GForge before I gave them up in 2009 to focus more on my career. During this time the projects I contributed to participated in the Google Summer of Code program where open source sponsors mentored college IT students in a effort to better both the student and the project. This earned me my first exposure into Silicon Valley and allowed me to collaborate with peers around the world from inside the Googleplex. Maintained a reporting dashboard for a transportaton logistics company that moved over one third of John Deere's domestic freight. This system tracked key metrics such a cost per hundred weight, freight recovery and delivery performance and it was the first all open source implementation in the company. Worked on an AJAX-based web system back in 1999 before the phrase AJAX was even coined. This system, made for a Compaq fulfillment subsiderary in Omaha, combined a variety of emerging technologies many of which are still relevant today (namely AJAX, XML and distributed processing).

Des Moines, Ia

Software consulting services to Iowa-based government organizations. Key duties include business analysis, business process redesign, software architecture and product management for the state's electronic payment gateway and authentication and authorization system.Key achievements were introducing open source software at a time there were no shortage of skeptics. Our team I introduced PHP, MySQL, NetBeans, JBoss (all on Linux) and introducing a culture of open source contribution from bug reports, patches and even launching OSS projects that originated in house.Those skills were employed to support the Iowa Sex Offender Registry, campaign finance tracking, response to the floods of 2003 and 2008, unemployment benefits and a number of the Governor’s initiatives.

I was the lead for the open source, content management system Geeklog, http://www.geeklog.net. Duties include coding, planning and coordination across international boundaries, release management and evangelism. I also helped the Geeklog project mentor college students as part of Google's Summer of Code (GSoC) for three years.

Urbandale, Iowa

I started Iowa Outdoors, http://www.iowaoutdoors.org as a personal project to learn more about Linux and open source development. Little did I know this would be my first step towards entrepreneurship. Starting Iowa Outdoors lead to my joining the open source, content management system (CMS) project Geeklog, http://www.geeklog.net. After a couple of years I took over as the project lead. I used Geeklog to build the best hunting and fishing community for Iowans. After growing traffic to over a million page views per month I sold the site to Heartland Communications based out of Ft. Dodge.

In perhaps the oddest job I ever had, as a software development manager for Tenant Piolot I actually did not work on the company's flagship property management software. Instead I helped build a now defunct online community aimed at the cattle industry. They company's primary investor, a class action lawyer, ran what was at the time, the third largest cattle heard in North America out of Missoula, Montana. While this job was quite brief, I did learn a lot about the various types of cattle key metrics like weening weight and milk production and even attended an auction where 1/3 share of a bull was sold for over $150,000.

As a software consultant with Norstan, I cut my teeth on both technology and the software skillsexpected in the industry. I was fortunate to be mentored by a close knit team, many of which I haveworked with at other jobs and with whom I am still close with to this day. As a green softwareconsultant I was responsible for: I was a PowerBuilder developer at Pioneer Hi-Bred working on a team that delivered a system to manage all of their products (corn, soybeans, etc) from pre-planting through harvest. In addition to basic programming duties, I was specifically responsible for working with middleware (IBM MQ Series) to get harvest data to their SAP ERP system. Developed a system for Norwest Mortgage (since bought by Wells Fargo) that stored meta data about all the mainframe systems so they could develop a detailed plan to consolidate as many systems as possible. Developed an enterprise system for The Sunflower Group in Kansas City that allowed them to include product samples in all major newspapers in the country. This included a complex GIS component for identifying the paper routes which included households in the target demographics for a given

This part of a cooperative education job I had while in college and it taught me one important thing...Idon't like writing software that talks too directly to hardware. That said, developing software for hand-held GPS receivers was a lot of fun and our work was truly validated when the federal governmentinstalled our PLGR-II units in airplanes following the tragic 1996 crash carrying U.S. CommerceSecretary Ron Brown. My specific responsibilities on the project were: Built real-time embedded code to run on Rockwell's PLGR II generation of hand held GPS units. This experience included interfacing with hardware on bread boards and dumping contents of memory to the VAX in order to debug memory values. Responsible for building the language modules needed to support a variety of languages including one of the most complicated, Arabic. Learned the internals of how GPS works as well as the application of selective availability (SA). Exposed to ISO 9001 certification process as well as the governmental bid process.

Mba, Business

B.S., Computer Science, Mathematics

Activities and Societies: Student Alumni Ambassadors,Ethnic Student Promoters,Student Telecounseling Admissions Representatives.