I can provide phone and email references to all of the clients on this page. There are actual code samples in some of the links below.

The Chico State Greenhouse has an inventory of over 3,000 plants. The manager, Tim Devine, uses Macintosh FileMaker Pro as an inventory database system. They wanted to make this database web-accessable, allowing visitors to access both data and images for these plants, but having control over the presentation and data field access. My task was to create a process so that Tim could continue to work within FileMaker, and yet have his changes reflected in the content of the website. I did this by automating a FileMaker to MySQL data conversion process and creating simple template-driven framework to display the information using Perl/CGI and DBI/MySQL. The CGI pages access a remote MySQL database that resides on Tim's OS-X machine, simplifying the data export. This application is not yet publicly available as of May 2005, but will be soon!

Zone Labs uses Bugzilla for their internal bug-tracking software. They had previously customized it to the point where it was impossible to do CVS updates on their code base. They had a long list of feature enhancements and user interface customizations, and needed to merge databases into a single instance. Bugzilla is a Perl/CGI web-based application using MySQL as the database backend. My work involved modifying database tables, creating new queries, and modifying the HTML web user interface as needed.

In 1998 I was offered partial ownership of this site in exchange for programming work. My initial task was to automate the review submission forms (previously, the owner was simply creating HTML pages manually from emails submitted to him!). Although this program grew to be very functional, we knew we could offer better search functionality (snowboard specific) if we switched to a database-driven design. In 2003 I implemented a MySQL/PHP solution, and it's working great. The submission process allows the user to preview their review, and the reviews are placed in a queue for approval. The review itself is template driven using a PHP package. Try the search function and see for yourself.

I worked with James Moss of first-river.com for over six months on a large database application that their consulting clients access via the web. It allows users to search a database of steel producers and also search past production history of different steel products back to 1985. It features session management, custom search queries, custom data output, and the ability to download results as Excel spreadsheets. This MySQL application currently has 31 tables, some with over 10,000 rows. The data was extracted from a large number of Excel spreadsheets from a windows platform (but of course this runs on a linux server). The front-end is Perl/CGI. [ Perl code sample ]

BEA Systems produces the WebLogic Server and Web Application Software. In January 2003 I completed a 6 day contract. Under a tight deadline I created a Perl script to generate an XML output file that represented a complex Oracle database schema. This was used to interface Java classes (via the XML) to the database table data. This structured OO code is currently being used in production. In a small secondary project, they had a giant directory structure of text files that were poorly organized, and need a one-time Perl script to re-organize this data. I can provide a reference to the tech lead of these projects.

This client has a large number of similar web sites on a single dedicated server, and had some very demanding technical requirements. They wanted all the price comparison listings to come from a single database (across many web sites) and they wanted the pages to appear with a .html suffix. This involved using Apache directives. I implemented the page interface to the database with PHP, and created a custom web interface to edit and update data using Perl/CGI. This was a MySQL database where the data was directly extracted from the original static HTML pages with a Perl script. Since this was on a dedicated server, we were able to tune the performance of the MySQL database to this specific application. But that was the easy part. The difficulty was in the complex relationship between the vendors links and the links on the client's site. They earned money from referrals to prescription drug sites, but wanted to track not just what vendors vistors were going to, but tie this in with where those vistors came from (how they were referred to the client's site) in order to judge the cost-effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. [PHP code sample]

I also helped them with a very complex custom automated solution that allows them to appear to be a prescription drug vendor (using LWP::UserAgent and other Perl modules). It essentially functioned as an intermediate handshaking protocol between the customer and the real drug vendor and needed to send and receive data from both sides. This ended up being only a couple hundred lines of Perl code.

RealTours.com is a web development firm, and I worked with them to create an number of custom applications to create and modify dynamic web content for one of their clients, HWD Builders, Inc.. This involved three separate applications: a free house listing script, a custom lot inventory listing application, and an interface that would allow the client to create and modify custom web pages with photo upload capability. The custom scripts used session management with cookies and a DB_File database. [Perl code sample]

I spent 12 months at Walmart.com. I could write pages regarding what I did there. The summary from my resume: "Designed and rewrote portions of the backend vendor communications software for the Walmart.com automated order fulfillment system. This interfaced with an Oracle database via PL/SQL procedures and also communicated with a Java XML message system. Wrote Java modules for parsing flat-file data into XML. Design of complex data parsing utilities and applications, such as a Perl application for parsing front-end .jsp server logs to determine the most frequent customer web search terms on WalMart.com."

I'd be glad to provide a reference to my manager there.