General Networks Corporation

January 2008 - January 2010

GNC was a consulting firm with many clients in the LA and Hollywood areas.

Matthew filled roles in various project development and management positions with emphasis on software engineering using C# and VB.Net for primarily developing software in WSS and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007. He also filled IT technical support roles for various contracting companies.

Projects:

• (Lead Software Engineer, Dependable Logistics Solutions, Los Angeles, CA). Matthew developed a custom Microsoft SharePoint solution to add and selectively update the metadata of potentially millions of customer transaction records with minimal impact on system performance while providing fault-tolerance, error recovery/reporting and process recovery in the event of server failure. He also added instant messaging capabilities to Microsoft SharePoint allowing staff to receive IM notifications of client interactions permitting faster response times and better record keeping. The hardest part was implemented a multi-threaded Windows service that processed thousands of e-mails with minimal latency before passing the modified results to a Microsoft SharePoint e-mail management system. The email management system was not able to handle emails from any source other than Outlook. Others, like Apple, introduced amazing complications since email standards became very flexible.
• (Software Engineer, The Pacific Bridge Companies, Monrovia, CA). Matthew developed a solution to map data from one specially designed PDF document to another different PDF document. The final intention was to populate Microsoft SharePoint forms with data from given PDFs and to also use data stored in Microsoft SharePoint to dynamically generate other PDFs.
• (Software Engineer, Warner Brothers Studios, Burbank, CA). Matthew provided Hummingbird / OpenText eDocs support and maintenance using VB.Net.
• (Software Engineer, Walt Disney Studios, Burbank, CA). Matthew provided basic Microsoft SharePoint development to demonstrate Microsoft SharePoint features.

Pros:

• Working with a variety of clients in a close manner making better products easier to deliver
• Awesome problems to solve
• Weekly phone conversations as others shared how they were solving complex problems
• Frequent “hand-shake” contracts made things more flexible

Cons:

• Very low salary with promises to improve wages that were rarely followed through with
• Many new co-workers often quit very quickly
• Frequent “hand-shake” contracts made GNC hard to appease