Mission Statement

As a freelancer, I improve lives by reducing drudgery through software and hardware. I believe in the potential of the passionate underdog. I learn by doing and teaching.

Process

I am the builder and general contractor. I take on projects as the analyst and creator, measurable goals are defined, fees are value based, and duration is three to six months. Your data is protected and remains yours. You have a license to the work product; I own the creative. I am selective, and the best creations come when paired with people passionate about their ideas.

Biography

As a child I gardened with Mom during the day and fixed cars with Dad during the evenings. Vacations were on motorcycles exploring national parks. Weekends were with my uncle or with older computer club friends learning electronics. An obsession of technology led to leaving high school to start college early.

At university, I maintained computation center servers overnight, and answered questions at the help desk during the day. A digital electronics design professor inspired an academic drive for computer science and engineering.

I split the year between being a software engineer at a computer graphics startup company and a student at Iowa State University. I did freelance work, converting professor's theories into software that allowed their methods to be easily applied and improve their publication’s citations.

While helping protein folding researchers, I began specializing towards solving biological problems. In graduate school, I first studied in a shark evolution lab, earning an MS for developing a theory of how evolutionarily constrained amino acids are spatially collocated and should be prioritized for therapeutic research. After working a few years fulltime, I completed a PhD where I developed a CAD system for designing and simulating biochemical networks for synthetic biology, optimizing stability in chaotic environments. To help with expenses, I sold a partial airplane that my wife and I were building.

I was employed by an agricultural biotechnology company (DuPont-Pioneer), as a bioinformatics software engineer and later as a computational research scientist, operating as an internal freelancer. Each year I found underrepresented research groups that needed prototype engineering requiring hardware and software design. My last role was leading a group helping to find agronomically beneficial genes. It was clear the hardware was limiting throughput and I began retrofitting and eventually replacing commercial plant phenotyping systems with custom optimized systems.

I lacked courage to leave fulltime until helping a friend with a pharmaceutical dispensing machine. Each weekend I was in San Diego, working around the clock in a modest environment on the software and electronics. After the machine was exhibited, I left Pioneer after 13 years to start Confluence Research and Development where I do freelance software-hardware work to fund the development of computer vision hardware that I have exhibited and sold. Research of CNC machines and control systems has been constant interest.

The freelancing years have been an exciting way to learn about myself. Nothing may prepare one for starting a company. I've tried various forms, but where I'm most productive and creative is working with the client, solo, and independently. From my struggle, I will pass earned experience to my son.