Engineering heritage
A working record that begins in 1979—and is still moving.
I've been a working programmer since 1979 — most of it spent making machines reason about money, and proving the answers. This is not a completed-career retrospective. It is the arc into current AI research, the platforms crossed along the way, and the parallel paramedic practice that keeps calm action, reassessment, and continuing education part of how I work now.
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. The work was ahead of its time, and most of it never reached the world: my partner and friend, who built it with me, died before we could deploy.
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 fixed statistical evaluation battery 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)
An early personal-computer portfolio system — published out of Pine Brook, New Jersey when personal software was still delivered on audio cassette. It put portfolio management in the hands of ordinary investors instead of only large 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.
FirstWitness & WitnessNetworks™
A personal-safety network: one button wrapped you in an "electronic bubble of security," alerting your trusted circle of friends and family over any channel the phone could reach — Wi-Fi, cellular, or GPS satellite — with real-time GPS, audio, video and accelerometer tracking. Life360 before Life360 existed.
SmartID™
Anti-counterfeiting that made the product prove its own authenticity. Dynamic, single-use SmartCodes™ authenticated an item at the unit level and expired the moment they were issued — no holograms, no serial labels, no proprietary readers, verifiable anywhere in seconds. It earned a signed contract with a major American guitar maker.
In memory
Some of the most original work on this page never reached the world. The partner and friend who built FirstWitness, WitnessNetworks and SmartID with me died before we could deploy them. The ideas were a decade early — a personal-safety network before Life360, product authentication before the industry moved past holograms. Losing him is why they stayed ideas. This one's for him.
The full bench
Longevity in this field means surviving platform extinction events. I've shipped on most of them.
The second active practice
A parallel career in critical care—and a discipline exercised on every shift.
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 more than 550 square miles, with patient-care intervals commonly lasting 30 to 90 minutes before handoff. Field Training Officer and mentor. Critical Incident Stress Management. A peer-support responder on the World Trade Center recovery detail in September 2001. Forty-plus years on ambulances—where nobody has ever called me anything but Andy.
The license is not maintained by seniority. It requires continuing classes for renewal and to remain current as medical knowledge and treatment protocols change. That makes learning, reassessment, and adapting to new evidence operating requirements, not professional slogans.
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 the name micp.com comes from.)
Continuing education & training
Academic and structured study
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) · MITx 6.00.1x — Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python.
Clinical practice and recertification
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) · continuing coursework and protocol updates required for license renewal.