David Boone

Skills

Experience

DeVry Greenhouses

Systems Architect / Implementation

Used technology to improve the efficiency of a rapidly growing company in a difficult, season business. From order entry to when product arrived at the customer, all aspects of customer service, product procurement and logistics were modernized and tied together using PostgreSQL.

• Sales / Customer Service
  • Tools to manage product properties such as how many fit on a shipping rack
  • Reporting tools allowing close management of customer orders
  • Online order editing site to allow stores to edit orders while maintaining efficiency
• Dispatching / Logistics
  • Custom .NET 2.0 application integrating Mappoint for mapping
  • Allowed drag and drop organization of loads, while tracking truck capacity and mileage
  • Calculate delivery times while honouring customer delivery windows
  • One click notification to customers of their upcoming delivery with ETA and order details, sent by email or fax
  • Touch Screen driver interface to track actual departure times and confirm truck, trailer and contact information
• Labor and Operations Efficiency
  • Designed and implemented labour reports related to product procurement as a means to increase efficiency
  • Created touch screen terminals to link all greenhouse operations to each other and the office
• Production and Planning
  • Created application to plan and track plant propagation and planting
  • Tracks thousands of product requirements and generates orders for all items
  • Generate reports to organize labour when planting

Developed custom OpenWRT based firmware for low-cost inter-site networking

By building off of the OpenWRT platform I was able to create a custom firmware image for the Linksys WRT54GL routers including kernel modules, applications and scripts to allow easy linking of geographically separate sites.

• OpenVPN based tunnels to allow secure passage of data over the WAN (internet)
• Quagga/OSPF based dynamic routing for routing between all LANS, regardless of the VPN links topology

GPS Tracking and Logging Device

Created a low cost vehicle tracking device based on an OpenWRT platform w/ WiFi connectivity.

• Designed a custom PCB interfacing GPS module with Broadcom SOC board
• Arranged for off-shore manufacture of PCB
• Designed and had built a customized power supply board integrating low-battery cut-off
• Created a light-weight, encrypted UDP protocol for server to device communications
• Wrote software to read, log and report NMEA GPS data
• Implemented change-of-direction detection to minimize data size while maintaining detailed historical route information
• Database and server to handle storage and retrieval of historical data
• Windows based client software to view historical data

Premier School Agendas

Webmaster

Using as much Open-Source technology as possible, I did the programming and system administration necessary to make the following sites (among others) dynamically driven and "work." Most projects with this company were done using Mason, a form of embedded perl, and run on Linux or OS/X servers. Load balancing among multiple HTTP servers and a separate database server was used where necessary.

• Corporate Site - www.premieragendas.com
  • Completely dynamic site for easy editing and maintenance
  • Online store: custom shopping cart and checkout system
• Student Learning Site - www.mydiscoverzone.com
  • Companion site to physical School Planner
  • Wrote all code to run site, including user signup and login, activities, messaging, forums, Project/Goal/Grade Managers, etc.
  • Over 350,000 users
• Product Configurator - configurator.premieragendas.com
  This job involved creating a highly interactive site that allowed customers to login and customize their planner order. Based on order information pulled from the company database using a custom protocol, the site would reflect the customers planner and require them to pick the options, customize the text areas and upload graphics. Graphics are checked that they are of the proper size and resolution suitable for printing before being accepted. In addition, events and holidays could be imported, entered and modified. I wrote custom code to allow Rich-Text-Editing of events, allowing customer to use bold, italics and underline within their events. All text areas were wrapped and checked for fit using font metric information.
• School's Customized Sites - www.premierplanner.org
  • Sites automatically created based on order information from company database or the Configurator site if applicable
  • Allows school administrator to customize URL, colors, School Name, Logos, etc of site
  • Publically accessible school calendars editable by the teachers
  • Students can create accounts and login to access personal Power Tools including My Mission, My Goals, My Projects and My Grades