Engineering heritage
Four decades of shipping systems that have to be right.
I've been a working programmer since 1979 — most of it spent making machines reason about money, and proving the answers. Below is the arc: the financial-systems through-line, the full range of platforms it crossed, and the parallel forty-year career that taught me why verification matters more than cleverness.
The arc
Software Engineer
Where it started. Fourteen years building portfolio, investment, and accounting software: Market Manager (portfolio management fed by live Dow Jones data, carried from the Apple II to the PC), Andrew Tobias' "Managing Your Money" for MECA, and the accounting platform M.Y.O.B. — 250,000+ lines of C I wrote on the Mac and ported to Windows 3.0 alone. The designated cross-platform expert on a single Windows/Mac source base. Languages: 6502/8086 Assembler, BASIC, Pascal, C.
Engineering residency (invitational)
Selected for elite training at Apple's engineering center — admission required a product in active development. Worked directly with Apple engineers on Macintosh internals and debugging ("heap walking") while porting our portfolio system to C. The centerpiece: a communications library for real-time portfolio updates from Dow Jones and downloading financial research — first-of-its-kind online connectivity.
Senior Software Engineer
Owned cross-platform code and database compatibility for ManagePro across Mac, Windows, and Unix (X-Windows) from one C++ source base — via conditional compilation and overloaded data-storage objects that adapted memory and alignment to each platform in real time. The result shielded the front-end team from platform nuance entirely.
Founder & independent engineer
Carried the cross-platform discipline into mobile and web: native iOS (Objective-C) and Android (Java), PHP/MySQL and ASP back-ends, with seamless data sync across devices, web, and cloud. Built medical statistical-analysis and patient-data software. Most recently, migrating the stack to Kubernetes — and into AI.
Senior Software Engineer / CEO
Founded and led an R&D firm building anti-counterfeiting and anti-abduction technology on mobile and web — real-time GPS tracking and high-availability communications, including safety systems still deployed in university settings. Led a team of researchers and developers.
Full-Stack Contract Programmer · API specialist
The go-to API and integration programmer. Recruited for Microsoft Access VBA, moved quickly into Microsoft SQL Server and T-SQL stored procedures. Built the credit-card and e-check payment libraries, and the integrations that let external systems — Salesforce, Sage Accounting, payment processors — talk to each other reliably and securely.
Orchestrated Hierarchical Multi-Agent System (HMAS)
The current chapter: an autonomous research system for systematic investing. A coordinator drives tiers of local and cloud models to discover and stress-test strategies; a deterministic statistical gauntlet decides what survives. Forty years after the Dow Jones feeds — the same problem, with far better tools.
Products that shipped
Oldest to newest — four decades of shipping, much of it under names you'll recognize.
Portfolio Management System (PMS)
The first personal-computer portfolio system of its kind — published out of Pine Brook, New Jersey, before Microsoft existed. Program and data loaded from an audio cassette, putting portfolio management in the hands of ordinary investors instead of just the big institutions. I took over unfinished code and shipped it under a hard deadline.
Teleminder
Dual left/right scrolling windows populated live from Dow Jones — headlines on the left; pick one and the full story fills the right. You entered the tickers you cared about, and the program dialed in, pulled the stories and quotes, and hung up so fast the bill was often near zero. Dow Jones learned they had to start billing in sub-minute increments because of it.
Market Manager Professional
Portfolio management fed by live Dow Jones data — the backbone of Teleware's product line. Sole programmer on the Professional edition, from design through final distribution.
Merrill Lynch Investment Challenge
A national contest pitting business students against professional investors. I built the modifications — including the anti-tampering that stopped students from editing trades after the fact — and trained Merrill Lynch's staff on the product.
Direct Access Demo
An English-like command parser that let non-technical staff drive the demo. The engine outlived the project — Teleware reused it as its help system for years.
Andrew Tobias' "Managing Your Money"
A personal-finance suite with real numerical muscle — financial calculations built on calculus, infinite series, and linear algebra, plus a reusable report generator I carried across products.
M.Y.O.B. — Mind Your Own Business
A full accounting platform: 250,000+ lines of C. I wrote it on the Macintosh and ported it to Windows 3.0 single-handedly, then maintained it for years as the market shifted.
ManagePro & ReviewWriter
The first software tool built to help managers succeed — one C++ source base across Windows, Mac, and Unix. I led the engineering team that designed and built the companion product.
The Scholar
A web-based distance-learning platform — built in the '90s, when the web barely supported such a thing — that trained Ortho Biotech's salesforce on Procrit, a life-saving medication. Centralized administration and reporting let a few managers track large cohorts of students with almost no overhead, on nothing more than a web-enabled PC or Mac.
TEAMS — Telecom Expense Analysis & Management
Reconciled phone-bill data from every major carrier — a dozen unrelated databases — to hunt down overbilling, recovering millions for clients like IBM and American Airlines. I replaced an army of typists keying boxes of paper bills by hand with fully automated acquisition: first CD-ROM, then EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) pulled straight from the carriers over ISDN.
Complete MICU Data Management System
Where the two careers meet: pre-hospital patient-data capture engineered to eliminate data-entry error in the back of a moving ambulance — built for the rigor of emergency medicine.
WitnessNetworks™ & SmartID™
Personal-safety and anti-counterfeit technology: real-time GPS, audio, video, and accelerometer tracking with secure-contact alerts; and dynamic-encryption authentication counterfeiters can't predict or copy.
The full bench
Longevity in this field means surviving platform extinction events. I've shipped on most of them.
The other forty years
A parallel career in critical care — and the discipline it leaves behind.
Since 1982 I've been a New Jersey–certified Mobile Intensive Care Paramedic, working advanced life support the whole time I've been writing software. High-volume inner-city units across Essex, Hudson and Passaic; autonomous rural medicine across 500+ square miles of Sussex County, with transport times past thirty minutes. Field Training Officer and mentor. Critical Incident Stress Management. A peer-support responder on the World Trade Center recovery detail in September 2001.
That work sets a standard the software inherits: design for the failure, not the demo; stay calm when the system is on fire; never trust a number you can't verify. It's not a tangent from the engineering — it's the reason the engineering is built the way it is. (It's also where micp.com gets its name.)
Education & training
Academic
County College of Morris — Electrical Engineering & Computer Science · University of Medicine & Dentistry of NJ (UMDNJ) — Paramedic Science (1981) · Seton Hall University — Chemistry · Apple "Mac College" — Macintosh internals (1984).
Certifications
Mobile Intensive Care Paramedic (NJ, since 1982) · ACLS · PALS · PHTLS · CPR/BLS · FEMA / NIMS ICS 100·200·700·800 · HazMat · Emergency & Evasive Vehicle Operation (EVOC).