Last Modified Ocotber 30, 2020, adding information about other work since 2010.
From June 2009 through at least August 2010, Al worked in non-computer related business.
Al moved from near Houston, Texas to West Des Moines, Iowa in October 1997.
There is a PDF resume at http://www.alprosser19.com/resume4web.pdf
Up until 1997 I maintained special computer applications to support the contract to supply software for the onboard computers for the Space Shuttle. I keep this page so that when someone asks what I used to do, I can tell them to look at my web page for details instead of talking for 5 minutes before realizing that they do not understand what I am talking about. Anyone capable of understanding, or at least appreciating what I do, is usually capable of reading it here.
For a little while worked in fields unrelated to Information Technology. Contact Al for information.
Educational Background http://www.alprosser19.com/aledu.html
If all this is not detailed enough, see also Al's Detailed Work History. There may be some specific cross references from this file to there as well.
Iowa Student Loan is a non-profit that helps Iowa families find affordable ways to finance secondary education. Al worked as a Senior Software Devloper, mostly on the Java system to take Student Loan Applications over the web.
Al helped split off parts into microservices creating REST APIs to be used to communicate with other microservices. Used Java 8 (Amazon Corretto), groovy, Apache Tomcat, Spring-boot, Spring Framework, Hibernate, SQL, SQL Server, ActiveMQ, Javascript, HTML, XML, Json, Git, nodejs, maven, numerous other Open Source frameworks. Testing was done using junit, mockito, Spock, Fitnesse and Cypress. Used pair programming and Test Driven Development.
Al worked at Iowa Student Loan from May 2016 until August 2020.
Teamquest was a small company selling comuter Capacity Planning and Server Performance monitoring software in Clear Lake, Iowa. It was bought by Help Systems soon after Al left.
Al develop and supported TeamQuest server monitoring agents, develop and maintain the database APIs between TeamQuest software and Oracle and PostgreSQL databases. Researched new technologies and plan how to incorporate or support them with TeamQuest software. Code was written in C++ running on Windows and several Unix/Linux platforms. Scaled Agile Framework methodology and continuous development and integration using Jenkins. Used some message passing rabbitMQ. Provided feedback to management on planning.
Al worked at Teamquest from September 2010 until April 2016 including time as a contractor.
Most recently (May 2006 – March 2009) I was working for the EDS Program Office as a Software Metrics Subject Matter expert. I coached Project Managers and middle management on how to use metrics to support EDS software development processes.
November 2002 - May 2006 I was doing middle ware server side Java development for internet and intranet applications using Oracle, Java, and Struts. Also did some VB and Unix scripting in SQL Plus, CICS, and sometimes working on the systems from earlier (below).
July 2002- October 2002 - I was hired back as a temporary to work on some of the systems I worked on earlier.
From late October 1997 until October 2001 I was working at what is now EDS Business Process Management Customer Relationship Management Solutions Development, or EDS BPM CRM SD in Des Moines, Iowa. My most recent title was Information Specialist. It is intentionally generic.
Since mid-Summer 2001 I was doing maintenance to their customization of their Retek Order Management System, using PL/SQL and Oracle. When the process improvement effort was aborted in summer 2001, I took a quick PL/SQL course to refresh my memory since taking a course to use SQL Plus on mainframes a few years ago.
I am still a Software Configuration Management Subject Matter Expert, and in the first half of 2000 I was working on the Process Improvement team for the CRM Solutions Development organization (over 300 people at 5 sites). I was helping to develop and roll out common Configuration Management processes. I tailored the company standard CM Plan template so it could be used as a base for projects within the organization. I developed a checklist to make sure that CM Plans had minimal desired characteristics and acted as mentor for the local CM SMEs to be able to assist their own projects.
In the last half of 2000 I worked in a department that supports various third party software and spent some time developing training material.
In Summer 2000 I was a project manager for a disaster recovery test.
From late-December 1999 until mid-2000, I was working on improving efficiency of their mainframe system to reduce costs. I was also my own project manager and took PM training including MS Project.
From October 1997 - late 1999
I could not afford to work in
the Space Program. I had already done just about everything there was
to do in the department I was in. With Better, Faster, Cheaper,
there was not much more for me to do, and not much room for
advancement. I also needed to find a school system that was more up
to date for helping children with communications
difficulties.
The job offered to me was a contract to hire through Enterprise Systems Associates in Overland Park Kansas for EDS in the Information Technology department serving newly acquired Neodata. The company became part of EDS and was named Centrobe for Customer Centric Global Solutions. They do various kinds of customer service, order fulfillment, customer retention, magazines, and related services. They are now part of EDS Business Process Management and called Customer Relationship Management or CRM.
While I was still a contractor, I did maintenance, troubleshooting, and some enhancements on their order processing system, written in PL/I, JCL, and using IMS. I was mostly learning their application, a monster written in the early 1980s. There was nothing at the time that I could not have done 8-10 years earlier. I survived, showed that I could pick up and do the work, and became a regular EDS employee in June, 1998.
Since joining EDS, I have been gradually been using more of my skills.
I worked on a project to set up an automated way to make changes to JCL for testing. I found that we had a product from Diversified Software called Job/Scan. It parses, checks, and can reformat JCL. I read the manuals and figured out how to write change commands, and to write user exits in REXX to perform audits or to write more sophisticated changes.
I began working on Year 2000 assessments soon after. They had been using an old version of the PL/I compiler, and needed to upgrade to the new Language Environment version. Since I had helped coordinate a similar upgrade at IBM several years earlier, I helped doing auditing and making some of the minor changes needed to run with the new compiler.
Near the end of 1998, we had assessed our programs and I joined the team to do Year 2000 testing. I built on the work I had done using Job/Scan to make JCL changes for Y2K testing. I later won a contest that Diversified put on for Y2K testing using their products. My entry in the contest is at www.alprosser19.com/jobscan.html
The biggest project I did for Y2K testing was to write a data aging program. The idea is to take data from today, and change the dates to simulate the same orders, payments, billing, and other transactions sometime in the future, say, over the weekend from 1999-2000. I wrote a driver program that would read a control file, determine the record format and calculate the number of days to age data, then pass the input and output files to separate subroutines. We would create new subroutines for each record format and plug them into the driver. I wrote a PL/I macro that would check for null or special values and call a special date routine that would add the number of days (could be negative). This meant that we only needed one line per field to reduce copy demons. I may write a separate page for aging later.
Some little while back, I joined the team working on coding standards. I had many years experience with process improvement in the Space Program. I hoped to use some of what I learned there at EDS.
In the summer of 2000 I took a one week course in Java. I have been following Java since it came out and I get the Java Developer newsletter and attend the Central Iowa Java Users Group.
Current email alprosser19@yahoo.com