About Me

The Short Story

I've been working in the software development world for 22 years since graduating from UCSD in 1985. I've worked in defense, instructional software, network analysis and simulation, expert systems and content management. I've worked for large companies, medium and small companies, and startups including one of my own.

Over that time, I've written or managed the development of probably hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I've been involved in the release of dozens of products, a few of them commercially successful. I've read dozens of books on programming, software management, agile methodologies, design patterns, networking and internet technologies. Hopefully over that time I've learned a few things that you might find helpful or interesting.

The Long Story

I made my entrance onto the world stage in the winter of 1962 at Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona. I was the fifth and last child in my family. My father was a physician in the Air Force at that time while my mother was busy raising three girls who were 5, 3 and a 2 and a boy who was 4 (don't ask me how she pulled that off).

billwixted.com

When I was three years old, my father was discharged from the military. He began looking around for a place where he could start his own practice and raise his family. Las Vegas was then a medium-sized town of about 80,000 people located in the hot southern Nevada desert that was beginning to gain some noteriety for its legalized gambling.

I would spend the next 14 years of life growing up in Las Vegas enjoying water skiing at Lake Mead and sledding in the snows of Mount Charleston. After graduating high school, I applied to and was accepted by the University of California at San Diego.

My path to UCSD was paved a few years before by my brother who was studying biology and psychology there. The transition from the hot desert wastelands of southern Nevada to the cool, windswept cliffs above La Jolla, California could not have been more dramatic. I had died and gone to heaven at the young age of 17.

My reverie was rudely interrupted by the extraordinarily rigorous challenges of UCSD's academic program. It was clear I would not be able to swim and surf my way through college. After a few years of undecided status, I took my first Computer Science class and I was hooked. After many late nights programming in C in a variety of courses I graduated in 1985 with a bachelor of arts degree in Computer Science. To this day, that diploma is my most prized possession.

In the summer of 1985, the cold war was in full swing and Ronald Reagan's military build-up was at its peak. It seemed logical then to seek employment in defense after my graduation from UCSD. I was fortunate to land my first position as a programmer with one of San Diego's most venerable institutions, Cubic Coproration.

While at Cubic, I worked on a system known as CIWS-MT (Close-in Weapons System Maintenance Trainer). This system is used to train naval engineers how to diagnose and troubleshoot the MK15 Phalanx Close-In Weapons System (shown at right). The Phalanx is basically a radar-guided gattling gun that serves as a last line of defense to protect naval ships from anti-ship weapons systems that have penetrated the outer layers of defenses that ring our ships at sea. The maintenance trainer was written entirely in Pascal which provides an excellent paradigm for structured programming.

When the defense buildup began to peter out in the late 1980s I moved on from Cubic to a small defense-oriented statup known as Antares Group. At Antares, I worked with a great group of engineers who were developing simulation systems using off-the-shelf and inexpensive hardware driven by computer programs written in C. I loved Antrares, but at the turn of the decade I began to question the growth prospects of the defense industry and decided to make a leap into the world of commercial software development.

My flying leap landed me at a startup known as Cogensys Corporation of San Diego. Cogensys had a fascianating and unique product known as the Judgment Processor. This was an expert system targeted for the financial and insurance industries that utilized a case-based reasoning system (CBR). The system was written in Pascal and C and ran on personal computers. I worked on various aspects of the system and developed a new algorithm that improved the accuracy of the decisions rendered by the system. In 1992, Cogensys was acquired by Cybertek Corporation and I was offered an opportunity to relocate to Dallas Texas which I turned on.

My next startup adventure was with Key Technologies International, a developer of multimedia-based instructional design software. At that time, Microsoft Windows was beginning to make an impact on the computing world and the strategic decision was made to convert the company's products from MS-DOS to Windows. I enjoyed programming in Windows and became quite adept at using their Visual C++ IDE.

Key Technologies never attained the momentum necessary to become succesful however and in 1994 I moved on to CACI International. At their satellite office in La Jolla, CACI developed simulation tools that could be used to model communication networks, simulate the operation of the network and provide measures of its performance. At CACI, I was the resident Windows-expert and led the company's migration from 16 to 32-bit Windows environments.

In 1996, I came across an opportunity to join yet another small startup as its eleventh employee. This one, Motiva International, was a developer of change-management solutions for the manufacturing industry. While at Motiva, I enhanced my skills with Visual C++ and Microsoft tools and eventually became a Director managing a group of up to 12 direct reports.

While at Motiva, I got the crazy idea that it would be good for me to get an MBA so I applied for and was accepted to the University of San Diego's School of Business in 1996. After four long years of night classes I had bulldozed my way through the program and obtained the degree. It was a tremendous learning experience but one that I would not recommend for anyone who already has a full-time job.

Meanwhile, Motiva was following the standard boom-to-bust cycle that afflicted so many technology companies in the late 1990's and early 2000's. After raking in a pile of venture capital and spending it like mad the company went belly-up. Six months prior to that unfortunate event I had begun to sense that the company was on the wrong track and I began looking for other opportunities.

It was early 2000, when four of my friends and I decided to quit our jobs and start eCritical. We had the idea that the Internet was going to be big, and that companies would pay big money to understand how their site was performing. We built a product that could passively monitor the traffic flowing in and out of a website, analyze it in real-time, and report on performance metrics. These metrics would help our customers understand how long it took a page to download and discover what kind of errors their site was generating.

Within a year of working out of our homes on our dime we managed to land an OEM deal with Network Associates. That was enough to keep us going for a few years as we worked to improved the product. By 2003, we began to look out for companies that might be interested in acquiring us and that's when we met the good people at Quest Software.

Quest bought us out and since then our website monitoring tool has achieved widespread market penetration as part of the Foglight suite. Our customer list includes Apple, Bank of America, British Airways, Caterpillar, Cognizant, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, Disney, Hilton Hotels, Intuit, McAfee, Medtronic, Orange, Papa John's, REI, Reuters, Sanofi Aventis, Vodafone, and XM Satellite.

As manager of the development team I have my hands full these days cranking out releases and pushing the performance envelope with our product. Every day web sites are getting more complex and attracting more traffic which makes my job even more difficult. I am having a great time with it. In my spare time, I work on this site and my blog. Thanks for reading.