Accomplishments

Speaker, writer, and 25+ year technologist in the areas of cybersecurity, software development, software requirements, project management across multiple industries and sectors.  I worked for a single employer for 22 years, and I own part of that company now.  Our customers span those multiple industries I mention on my Skills page.

For the last 3 years I’ve been speaking, writing, teaching, running a non-profit that was ending, building another non-profit (Missouri Cybersecurity Center of Excellence) and consulting in a general sense. In 2025, I’m building my fractional software development life cycle and writing company, Codistac, more purposefully as a business.

Nearly every employer I’ve worked for has made a new job for me within the first year of employment that harnesses all of my skills, and the work I do is typically half people-oriented and half technical.

Please visit my speaking and writing pages that are linked above to learn more about those skills and practices. The following are some career highlights:

• Built an early software-as-a-service (SaaS) company’s technical team and operations. The software launched in mid 2003.
• Exceptional customer retention year to year because of a long, detailed sales cycle and consistently happy enterprise-level customers.
• Over a thousand interviews conducted while I was working in HR.
• Coded a flat file data parser that ran hundreds of thousands of files in its lifetime. It was configurable to receive and transform data from various fixed width and delimited formats and even follow customer-defined rules from that configuration to handle missing data.
• Coded an enterprise level web-based software package iterating from that early SaaS product release.
• Modeled and implemented a database that contained over 200 interrelated tables.
• Managed software development and high-volume data integration projects for large, recognizable brands.
• Mastery of remote work methodologies with 18+ years of practice.
• Programmed a job requisition tracking program for the St. Louis County Government Division of Personnel in Microsoft Access because that’s what we had. This was in the 90s and replaced a paper process in a time before there were even applicant tracking systems.
• Upskilled and trained in cybersecurity when it became clear that security is more important now than programming and building was in the 90s.
• Attended various client meetings across the United States to bolster those important relationships.
• Wrote for Export Compliance Manager and attended meetings and working sessions with OAGi, a standards body.
• Worked within a group sponsored by Pax8 that conducted intense review of the Center for Internet Security (CIS) v8 Controls (18 controls, 153 safeguards).  This is one of the deliverables. (PDF format)
• Considerable volunteerism.

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These are some important stories behind those accomplishments.

I spent 5 years working in my first job, from 16 to 21. I worked as a traveling store-to-store shift manager at 19, covering manager and assistant manager vacations.

College was free – Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University) – 3 cobbled-together scholarships.  One of those required a particular score on the ACT test.  I took the test 6 times until I got that score because I knew I could do it. Graduated with honors while working almost full time as well.  Bachelor’s degree is in Communications Management (or business communication), Music minor.

During the collegiate journey I had to pause to beat cancer in 1992.

I completed coursework for half of my Master’s in Public Administration at University of Missouri – Columbia but moved to another city where the degree wasn’t available.

In high school, I wanted to be a band director, so I began college with that aspiration and shifted my degree focus after my cancer experience. I still play my trumpet in church regularly.