Career History - Unabridged

The Beginning

In 1996, I became interested in computer programming and development. After dabbling with different development environments, I became most familiar with Visual Basic 5.0. I wrote some third-party add-ons for the AOL client that enhanced certain features. I kept these add-ons, mostly for my own benefit, because at the time I did not know much about marketing or website creation.

In 2000, I began to experiment with website creation in PHP. I purchased a PHP / MySQL book and created a website called www.darcfx.com which I was going to use to display examples of code created by myself and a few others. These examples would provide practical examples of how different programming methodologies could be implemented and practiced. In September of 2000, darcfx.com launched. A friend of mine provided me with some example files from his site that he had long wanted to discontinue, and darcfx.com was linked on that site’s home page to fill in the gap. After a few months of being launched, darcfx.com averaged between 1000 and 2000 total homepage-only requests per week. To date, the homepage has seen over 95,000 requests. The site has over 2,000 registered users and over 900 open source programming examples.

Due to the popularity of the site among third-party AOL programmers, novice programmers began tracking me down in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel which I frequent. They would ask programming questions and I would tutor them (as best I could at the time) and provide live assistance and suggestions. I used it as an opportunity to learn and pass those learnings along to others.

Professional Experience

In 2002, while in High School, I was offered an opportunity to volunteer as a network administrator for the South-west Licking School district. On a daily basis (usually during scheduled study halls, often after the conclusion of the school day, and occasionally on Saturdays if requested), I aided in tasks such as new user creation, Active Directory configuration through Group Policies on the Windows Domain Controllers, maintenance, running cables, formatting and reimaging workstations, and setting up rack mounted servers throughout the 5 buildings in the district.

In September 2004, I was hired as a Product Specialist in the Technology department at Circuit City in Columbus, OH. At Circuit City, my responsibilities included educating customers and other employees concerning the details of current computers, monitors, printers, digital still cameras, digital video cameras, and accessories for all this equipment. My individual sales statistics were almost always in competition with the top 3 sales spots for an employee in the Technology department in the Columbus district (then, a 5 store span).

While employed at Circuit City, I met an individual who introduced me to a web development / print formatting company called RadialStudios, out of Westerville, OH. Outside of my full time college course work and my job at Circuit City, I worked for RadialStudios on a private contractor basis on and off for around a year. At RadialStudios, my responsibilities were Web Application Development and Maintenance in PHP and MySQL. I developed smaller applications (due to my unavailability as a result of school and my part time job at Circuit City), provided code reviews, and performed maintenance on projects that had already been created.

In April 2005, I began volunteering for the website maintenance division of the Information Technology department of World Harvest Church. Believing in the cause of that ministry greatly and enjoying web development, I excelled there. At the time, the web systems were written in ASP (VB script) through ASP/ IIS 6.0. The database used then was Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

In my first 10 days of involvement, I volunteered for 40 hours. During this time, I wrote a series of SQL tables, views, and stored procedures, and a few ASP script files that automated a job that had been filling 10 hours a week for a part time employee that was planning to relocate out of state. I also quickly picked up knowledge of the e-commerce order system that was in place at the time and was able to write some SQL reporting for management.

Around this same time, I was offered an opportunity for promotion to Senior Product Specialist at Circuit City, but the Director of Information Technology at World Harvest Church offered me a full-time position at World Harvest through the summer and told me during the school year I could return to part-time employment with the ministry and continue my religious studies. I resigned my employment at Circuit City, and was hired on to World Harvest Church on May 9th, 2005.

Through the summer, I displayed development talent through automating part of the process by which the ministry sends bulk email messages to their donors and constituents. I also took on the primary responsibility of developing a web application for the World Harvest Church Ministerial Fellowship, whereby ministers of other churches could come to the site, learn more about the fellowship, apply for membership (including paying the application fee), and receive updates through their membership. The application included tools by which the office of the fellowship could manage, publish, and approve text and picture content without the assistance of a developer.

Because of the quality of this project, at the end of the 2005 summer, my Director asked me to continue working full-time for World Harvest through the school year. I began school again as a full-time student and continued working full-time for World Harvest Church. This continued until mid-2006 when I discontinued my religious education, which had classes every weekday from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM, to make myself more available for the ministry during business hours.

At World Harvest Church, I have been responsible for automating the unsubscribe process for bulk email blasts sent by the ministry – a job that had previously taken our email manager roughly 2 – 4 hours per week to complete.

In 2007, I architecturally and developmentally led a team of 7 engineers and developers in the creation of www.rodparsley.com, and all its internal affiliate websites, in ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX, which would become the primary website for the ministry. I played a key role in deciding on the technologies used and the path taken to complete the project.

In 2007, World Harvest Church asked me to travel (on occasion) with the support staff for the Pastor to various churches through the nation to administrate live broadcasts on the web whereby people could view the services the Pastor was preaching. Due to my experience and expertise regarding Internet related I.T. technologies and my ability to represent World Harvest Church in a professional and positive light, I was chosen to make 3 such trips, the first of which was the public launch of Rod Parsley’s New York Times’ Best Seller, Culturally Incorrect, and the new www.rodparsley.com on June 2, 2007.

In September 2007, World Harvest Church launched an initiative titled World Harvest LIVE! whereby viewers and visitors to the website could participate in a live broadcast of the churches weekly services, including tithes, offerings, and prayer request submissions directly on the website. The development and architecture of the World Harvest LIVE! solution was completed under my supervision and direct development efforts.

In 2008, World Harvest deployed a new e-commerce/order system (handling all transactions, orders, store purchases, event registrations, prayer requests, etc.). Along with another individual, I architected the business logic of the system, created the User Interface concepts that were eventually adopted, and led 3 other individuals in development efforts. The project eliminated many system inconsistencies that had been discovered since the legacy e-commerce system had been implemented before my employment there.

Throughout my employment at World Harvest Church, the Director of Information Technology involved me in the interview process so that I could provide him with my technical opinion of potential candidates-for-hire. Occasionally, I was asked to sit in with the executive team on presentations of third party vendors and while technical decisions were made.

Personal Comments

Above all, I love learning. Challenge is one of the number one things that drives me to succeed. If I am able to find something challenging that I do not already know how to accomplish, I determine myself to find a solution, and implement it in an efficient way as soon as possible. This determination is what keeps me on the cutting edge of Web Applications Development.

I have greatly enjoyed my experiences with my past and present employment, and every day I look forward to the new challenges and paths that will be brought my way (and how I might help to improve them, in any way I can).