Projects
These are in-house software projects that I pursue in my spare time, or would pursue if I had spare time.
BMSE
This is more of a strategy than an implementation. Although I have a useful Perl implementation, it doesn’t have to be Perl. The strategy was inspired by a client who had come close to an optimal IT solution for their business. The biggest problem was that the application was written in a proprietary language which kept the application captive to a particular hardware platform.
"BMSE" is what I call a particular strategy to deliver mission-critical data management for very small businesses. This optimization is pretty comprehensive. It takes disaster recovery, core business goals and skillsets into account. Essentially, it moves a business out of a renter/consumer role and into an ownership/producer role. It requires deliverables for all expenses and keeps all vendors in a competitive position and mitagates or eliminates increased risk of vendor consilidation. BMSE allows the business to take advantage of the best 3rd party tools, platforms and frameworks without putting them unnecessarily in the critical path or into a captive position.
I know that this is what my client wanted and almost acheived. I see many small businesses simply paying rent, which is okay in many cases, but I don’t see them leveraging IT to optimize their business. It’s an opportunity cost that large vendors have no incentive to solve.
Applications for Production
Open source CMSes are great. They often make web site operations doable by a layperson but they do leave gaps and are not necessarily the best solution in all circumstances. Take photo galleries, for instance. The task of creating lots of large galleries creates a very large and tedious task for a layperson and it produces non-optimal galleries. I have automated gallery production that have a number of advantages over the open source galleries. It does a better job in far less time and all manual effort is recoverable.
Another application which I can imagine but have no time to design, let along build, is an information management production environment. Granted, there are great SaaS cloud-apps popping up all over, but I think there is room and good reason still to innovate on the local environment.
