Aranscia
Healthcare technology · Unified Platform Technical Lead
Merging five acquired healthcare products into one Azure SaaS platform under HIPAA, HITECH, HITRUST and SOC 2 — without switching any of them off first.
BDG Software · Bruce Gilham Jr. · since 1996, incorporated 2000
I fix software projects in trouble, and build the ones nobody else will take.
If your business runs on Silverlight, LightSwitch, Classic ASP, Visual Basic 6, FoxPro, or a Delphi program nobody left on staff can read, you already know. The person who wrote it is gone, the runtime is unsupported, and the job posting has been open for months. I come in, learn the thing, and get you off it without stopping the business.
35years writing software, full time since 1996
16industries, from cryogenic pumps to casino floors
10systems on this site still in production, one since the 1990s
1person on the call — the same one who does the work
The platforms, and what I have done on each
Every one I have shipped on. Every one I have migrated off.
Dead · support ended October 2021
Your Silverlight application has no browser left to run in. I have shipped on Silverlight and I have migrated off it.
Dead · retired with Visual Studio 2015
LightSwitch generated your app. Nobody can regenerate it now. I built four production systems on LightSwitch — payroll, used-car wholesale, right-of-way appraisal, a food plant — and I have moved off it.
Classic ASP still runs. That is the problem. I migrated a music-rights royalty system and a twenty-year Billboard chart archive off Classic ASP — the second one to Blazor on Azure, with the business publishing throughout.
The VB6 runtime survives on Windows. The developers do not. I have shipped WinForms desktop systems for a bond-pricing desk, an industrial fastener-measurement fixture, an investment back office and a food plant, and moved desktop systems to the web.
Orphaned · the developers are retiring
Delphi is alive. Your Delphi 5 codebase is not. I learned Delphi in the 1990s in my father's shop and never stopped.
Dead · support ended January 2015
FoxPro. Yes, still. I moved a chart-data publisher's FoxPro archive and book-generation tools onto Azure SQL, and kept the FoxPro tools running against the new database until their replacements were ready.
Orphaned · HCL owns it; nobody is hiring for it
Your records are in Notes databases. Getting them out is the job. I spent thirteen years inside one firm's Lotus Notes estate — first building inside it so their investment was not thrown away, then lifting the records into SQL Server when the time came to put a client portal on top.
Also on the list: WCF and WCF RIA Services, WPF, Entity Framework 6, SQL Server 7, Microsoft Access back ends, Silverlight-era Dynamics CRM customisations, and the ArcGIS Silverlight SDK. I read legacy C and C++ when the migration runs into it.
How an engagement goes
Read it
I take the code, the database, and whoever is left, and come back with what the system actually does — usually different from what anyone thinks — and what it will take to move. I write the specification first and get it signed off before code.
Move it, one piece at a time
Old and new run side by side. Features cross over one at a time and the old one is switched off only after the new one has proved itself in production. The business never stops.
Hand it over
You end on C#, .NET, and Azure or SQL Server — a stack you can hire for — with documentation, and your own people able to carry it. I am not trying to become your permanent dependency.
Selected work
All 24 engagements, searchable →Record Research Inc.
Publishing — chart data · Sole developer and architect
Decades of Billboard chart data moved off SQL Server 7, Classic ASP and Visual FoxPro onto Azure, while the books kept getting published.
Mason & Mason / DSM, Inc.
Right-of-way appraisal and eminent domain · Sole developer and architect
Thirteen years as the only developer for a right-of-way appraisal firm — an operating system built inside their Lotus Notes estate, then rebuilt twice as Microsoft discontinued the platform underneath it.
Frasco Inc.
Background screening and investigations · Sole external developer and architect
The missing front door for a national background-screening firm whose production system was an in-house Delphi/InterBase application — built on top of it, not instead of it.
Coast Asset Management
Fixed-income asset management · Lead developer and rescuer
A fixed-income desk's daily trading tools, rewritten off forty hand-maintained flat files onto the Bloomberg API — and the 'mouse flicker' fault nobody could solve, found inside the vendor's own .NET wrapper.
We Buy Cars / Used Car Club
Used-vehicle wholesale · Sole developer and database rescuer
Arrived on broken SQL replication and a data warehouse losing rows; stayed six years to replace the Access system the business ran on.
Who this is for
A CTO, CFO or owner with a system that runs the business and a job req nobody is filling. You have a budget for a fix, not for a body. Very often the migration is the second problem: the first is that nobody knows what the old system does any more. I handle both.
Not for: greenfield apps that any agency could build, staff augmentation by the hour, or anything I would not personally put my name on. I have spent thirty-five years going in and either building what could not be built or fixing what other people broke, and that is the work I take.
Tell me what it runs on
Say what the system does, what it is written in, and what breaks when it goes down. I will tell you in plain terms whether I can help and roughly what it takes. No sales call, no deck.
Start here