Aranscia
Healthcare technology · Unified Platform Technical Lead
Five acquired healthcare products becoming one Azure platform under HIPAA, HITECH, HITRUST and SOC 2, with none of them switched off and no customer left unserved while it happens.
BDG Software · Bruce Gilham Jr. · in business since 1996, incorporated 2000
The system your business runs on is out of support. I get you off it without stopping the business.
If the business runs on Silverlight, LightSwitch, Classic ASP, Visual Basic 6, FoxPro or an old Delphi program, you already know the risk: the person who wrote it has gone, the vendor has stopped supporting it, and the job posting has been open for months. I come in, work out what the system actually does, and move you off it while the business keeps running. You pay for a fix, not for a body on a chair.
35years in the trade, full time since 1996
16industries, from cryogenic pumps to casino floors
10systems on this site still earning their keep, one since the 1990s
1person on the call — the same one who does the work. No account manager, no hand-off
The platforms that put businesses at risk, and what I have done about each
I have built on every one of these, and moved businesses off every one.
Dead · support ended October 2021
Your Silverlight application has no browser left to run in, and the people who built it have gone. I have built on Silverlight and I have moved businesses off it.
Dead · retired with Visual Studio 2015
LightSwitch built your application. Nobody can change it now. I built four production systems on LightSwitch, for payroll, used-car wholesale, right-of-way appraisal and a food plant, and I have moved off it.
Classic ASP still runs. That is why it never gets fixed. 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 people who can maintain it are retiring. 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. The one person who can read your Delphi 5 program is not on staff. I learned Delphi in the 1990s in my father's shop and never stopped.
Dead · support ended January 2015
FoxPro. Yes, still. And the business still depends on it. 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, so the business never stopped.
Orphaned · HCL owns it; nobody is hiring for it
Your records are in Notes databases. Getting them out without losing them 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 covered: 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. If the old system reaches into C or C++, I read that too.
How an engagement goes, and what you get at each step
Find out what you actually own
I take the code, the database and whoever is left, and come back with a written account of what the system actually does — usually different from what anyone thinks — and what a move will take. It is a fixed, bounded piece of work, and you keep the document whatever you decide next.
Move it without stopping the business
The old system and the new one run side by side. Work crosses over one piece at a time, and the old system is switched off only after the new one has proved itself in production. There is no cutover weekend and no day the business cannot operate.
Hand it over, with no dependency on me
You end on C#, .NET and Azure or SQL Server — a mainstream stack you can hire for at market rates — with documentation and your own people able to run it. I am not trying to become your permanent dependency.
Selected work
All 24 engagements, searchable by sector →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 the business sells 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: the system the firm runs on, built inside their existing Lotus Notes investment, then rebuilt twice as Microsoft discontinued the platform underneath it, without stopping the firm's work.
Frasco Inc.
Background screening and investigations · Sole external developer and architect
The missing front door for a national background-screening firm: self-service ordering built on top of their working Delphi/InterBase back office, not instead of it, and a costed argument that saved them an eighteen-month replacement project.
Coast Asset Management
Fixed-income asset management · Lead developer and rescuer
A fixed-income desk's daily trading tools rebuilt off forty hand-maintained files onto the Bloomberg feed, and a years-old display fault nobody could solve traced to the vendor's own software. Fourteen years on the desk.
We Buy Cars / Used Car Club
Used-vehicle wholesale · Sole developer and database rescuer
Arrived to fix broken reporting and stayed six years to replace the Access system the business ran on, finding along the way that the reports had been built on data that was neither live nor complete.
Who this is for
An owner, CEO or CFO 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 for the business, what it is written in, and what stops 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.
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