Smartronix

August 2015 - January 2019

Smartronix was a government contractor job. There isn’t a whole lot Matthew can talk about unless the focus is one very hand-wavy work experience.

In this role Matthew supported ETIRMS, a very old Navy project that acts as a front-end to a very large and dynamic database used by many other projects. ETIRMS was a part of the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWC-WD), Point Mugu, CA.

Matthew performed software engineering for supporting various Navy aircraft, weapons systems, and other existing or newly developed applications and tools. He was the goto-guy for many solutions.

Tasks included designing and integrating new external interfaces (supporting multiple clients, vendors and platforms), VB6 conversion to C#, code analysis, requirements analysis, unit testing, debugging, use cases creation, and regular expressions. The programming effort utilized C#, Java, VB6, C/C++, WinForms, WPF, IDL, COM, XML, SQL, MSTest, Microsoft Word, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, and Visual Studio 2005- 2017, Unity3D HoloLens, SharePoint, Rational Rose, ClearCase, and Great Migrations.

Pros (Smartronics):

• Matthew felt good believing he was helping those who served the country
• Smartronix was a very friendly employer who liked to tap into contractor employees for other work on the side
• Nice supportive management

Pros (ETIRMS):

• Matthew was happy to see that really old, often 10+ years, applications were being improved
• Willingness to accept complex ideas like heat-mapping, parallel processing, SOLID OOP, and Agile
• There were a variety of co-workers that were fun and engaging to work with
• With effort, management would allow training courses in new programming skills

Cons (Smartronix):

• Health and retirement benefits were not very good

Cons (ETIRMS):

• New overly aggressive managers started appearing and kept being forced to leave
• People were sometimes physically and / or verbally violent
• Hardware was very difficult to use at optimal performance