Hello world, I’ve been engineering software for over 16 years now and it’s about time I started sharing out what I’ve found works, what doesn’t, and even just what’s on my mind. I’ll use these to solidify my core values, principles and practices as an engineer that I guide myself by since I find that if I don’t write something down it usually doesn’t really stick. Hopefully some of you find it useful, too.

If you have any questions about anything I post on my blog, leave a comment and I’ll happily discuss.

Quick Bio

I’m from the Department of Defense research and development (R&D) world, having spent my whole career as a DoD contractor working on and leading small teams of highly-motivated s/w engineers to build apps (as they are now called) that make operators safer, that save them time, or that allow them to do something they never could do before.

My teams have typically run on shoestring budgets with contracts lasting fewer than a couple years. We’ve had to perform our own testing, quality assurance, UI/UX design, marketing, and CI builds. To anyone who’s worked at a FAANG company, you would be alarmed by how much time my teams have had to spend doing things other than developing software!

I’ve worked in WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET, Unity, web (MERN), GIS / geospatial (ESRI ArcGIS, Cesium), Java, and even some AI/ML prototyping in PyTorch. A lot of my work has been developing prototypes that have gained traction and advanced to programs. We’ve been very successful in addressing the essence of a customer’s challenge and getting work to mature from that initial capability.

Scrump… Works???

Scrump is the ‘S’ from my first name and the first 5 letters from my last. The “works” was inspired by Lockheed Martin’s famous “SkunkWorks” advanced R&D shop responsible for successes like the P-38 Lightning, SR-71 Blackbird and F-22 Raptor. “Be Quick, Be Quiet and Be on Time” – Kelly Johnson, SkunkWorks.