Robert Fischer

Current

• Open Source Ocaml Contractor at Merjis
• Web Service/Application System Developer at Integration Architects
• Ruby on Rails Website Developer at Perfectly Earthly

• Problem Solver and Smokejumper at Smokejumper Consulting (Self-employed)

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Past

• Agile/Pragmatic Consulting Subcontrator at SGF Consulting
• FIT/Agile Adoption Specialist and Java Developer at ECMC
• Groovy/Grails/Flex Developer at Carol

• Java Development and Agile Adoption Consultant at Room and Board
• Founder at A Place Coworking Center
• Perl Scripter at AllRegs
• Agile Implementation/Development Consultant at Wells Fargo
• Technical Lead at United Behavioral Health
• Developer for Health Monitoring Group at Thomson Legal and Regulatory
• Web Developer at Healthia Consulting
• Junior Developer at Hamline/3M
• MSAccess Developer at AOPC

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9 more...

Recommended

14 people have recommended Robert

Connections

100 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

• My Company
• My Blog

Robert Fischer’s Summary

My background is in application design and development in a variety of technologies, including Perl, Java, Ruby-on-Rails, Groovy-on-Grails, and Ocaml. I am always very interested in opportunities to work with the Ocaml programming language commercially.

My primary strength, however, is in working directly with business people to quickly implement solutions for business problems. My approach is pragmatic and iterative -- in short, that means that I focus on giving you the most bang for your buck by constantly delivering small increases in functionality.

In addition to long-term consulting, I am additionally available for "smokejumping" contracts -- very short-term contracts focused on helping projects reach their immediate goals. My background is filled with cases where I have proven my ability to hit the ground running and deliver in a crunch.

Finally, I am also available for training and one- or two- week pair programming to help your business adopt a new technology with which I'm familiar. Examples include multithreaded Java programming, the Framework for Integration Testing (FIT), and Groovy on Grails.

Robert Fischer’s Specialties:

Technical Team Mentoring and Leadership, Technology Training, Agile Adoption (particularly Scrum and emergent/business-customized processes), Software Architecture and Development (Web and batch applications in Java, Ruby, Groovy, F#/OCaml), Continuous Integration Environments (Cruise Control, Hudson, and Bamboo)

Robert Fischer’s Experience

• Open Source Ocaml Contractor

  Merjis

  (Marketing and Advertising industry)

  April 2008 — Present (2 months)

  Working for Jeremy Chatfield at Merjis to enhance the CocanWiki system, an open source Ocaml-based wiki.

• Web Service/Application System Developer

  Integration Architects

  (Information Technology and Services industry)

  December 2007 — Present (6 months)

  Building a system which consumes government web services and interfaces with local applications in order to provide additional data. The system is built on Groovy-on-Grails, and includes a Hudson deployment for user acceptance testing.

• Ruby on Rails Website Developer

  Perfectly Earthly

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Retail industry)

  October 2006 — Present (1 year 8 months)

  Building a small e-commerce website for Perfectly Earthly, an online retailer. Leveraging the conventional model of Rails so that the site may be easily expanded and maintained by designers familiar with only HTML/CSS. This project was begun after much frustration with Zen Cart. The intent will be for the shopping cart framework to be productized as the standard shopping cart implementation for Graphic Karma Web Design.

• Problem Solver and Smokejumper

  Smokejumper Consulting (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  June 2004 — Present (4 years)

  My wife and I co-founded and run a consulting agency. I provide a technical consulting service, as described in my summary. My wife provides graphic and web design consulting, focussed on independent contractors and small businesses.

• Agile/Pragmatic Consulting Subcontrator

  SGF Consulting

  (Partnership; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  November 2006 — April 2008 (1 year 6 months)

  I am a subcontractor associated with SuperGoFaster (SGF) Consulting. I have signed on with them because I have deep respect for the partners of that company, and I see a lot of wisdom in their pragmatic/agile approach to software development.
  
  My relationship with them has been off-and-on, but since LinkedIn can't support that, I'm setting the time period from the first date of my first contract with them to the last date of my most recent contract.

• FIT/Agile Adoption Specialist and Java Developer

  ECMC

  (Non-Profit; 201-500 employees; Financial Services industry)

  November 2007 — April 2008 (6 months)

  Brought in for phase 2 of a major project which had a very tumultuous initial phase. Specifically, worked with SGF Consulting (www.sgfco.com) to implement a new Agile adoption, including evangelizing test-driven development and improving developer <-> business communication through living specifications.
  
  Key technologies are FIT/FITLibrary, EJB 3.0, and JBoss Seam.

• Groovy/Grails/Flex Developer

  Carol

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  August 2007 — November 2007 (4 months)

  Brought on board to help build a website for a start-up health care company, structured as a Groovy-on-Grails service with a Flex/Flash front-end. Key technologies are Java, Lucene, Groovy, Grails, Flex/Flash (Action Script 3.0).

• Java Development and Agile Adoption Consultant

  Room and Board

  (Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Retail industry)

  February 2007 — August 2007 (7 months)

  I was brought on board in order to guide the adoption of continuous integration and evangelize test-driven development, as well as provide an extra hand to take care of some of the backlogged work for their Java web application. Primary focus of work was in managing the data feed out of SAP into their website, including modeling that database, generating database views, performance tuning the database, and generating ORM mapping for the Java code via Hibernate. Other key Java technologies included Bamboo, Jira, Ant, Spring, Hibernate, Struts, Velocity, and Jakarta-Commons.

• Founder

  A Place Coworking Center

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  May 2007 — August 2007 (4 months)

  Founded "A Place", a business community for freelance and telecommuting professionals.
  
  For more information, see: http://www.theaplace.com/wiki

• Perl Scripter

  AllRegs

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Financial Services industry)

  March 2007 — April 2007 (2 months)

  Generated a maintainable, well-documented CGI script that automatically logged users into a customer website. The script was in server-agnostic Perl, capable of running under the Apache HTTP Server, the Tomcat CGI-BIN servlet, and under either FastCGI or mod_perl. Additionally generated usage documentation.

• Agile Implementation/Development Consultant

  Wells Fargo

  (Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; Banking industry)

  November 2006 — February 2007 (4 months)

  Initially worked on a series of “clean up” projects. These projects were primarily web applications that needed some emergency help to reach year-end goals. Additionally gathered requirements for, designed, and worked with the business infrastructure team to implement an Agile development environment and project archetype that included continuous integration, database management, and business-facing reports. Participated in requirements mining and priority setting for a new build, tracking, reporting, and deployment system. Key technologies included Cruise Control, Ant, and Struts.

• Technical Lead

  United Behavioral Health

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; UNH; Insurance industry)

  November 2005 — November 2006 (1 year 1 month)

  I began as a switch-hitting Java and Perl developer on a project that was running very late, but graduated up to technical lead when the project staff transitioned. In doing so, I brought in the Scrum development methodology (a flavor of Agile), which I credit with the amazing turn-around that resulted. As part of being a technical lead, I implemented automated reporting processes built off of the build cycle in order to track key technical and business metrics. Key technologies: Java, Perl, JUnit, CruiseControl, XML/XSLT.

• Developer for Health Monitoring Group

  Thomson Legal and Regulatory

  (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; TOC; Legal Services industry)

  December 2004 — November 2005 (1 year)

  Implemented customer-driven application improvements and took the initiative to introduce test driven development to the team responsible for monitoring the health of the WestLaw technical infrastructure. Specifically, ported a collection of VB/ASP web applications to C#/ASP.Net. Received awards for outstanding performance in implementing these ports. Key technologies: C#/ASP.Net, NUnit, MockObjects.

• Web Developer

  Healthia Consulting

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  August 2002 — December 2004 (2 years 5 months)

  Worked on the StoneBridge Exchange (now Healthia Exchange) insurance eligibility verification gateway.

• Junior Developer

  Hamline/3M

  (Educational Institution; Higher Education industry)

  February 2001 — September 2003 (2 years 8 months)

  Provided technical assistance for a 3M/Hamline University liaison exploring the ways to improve undergraduate science and math education. Developed an interactive textbook written in the Perl language and running on the Apache web server on UNIX.

• MSAccess Developer

  AOPC

  (Partnership; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  May 2000 — August 2000 (4 months)

  Lived and worked in Cologne, Germany. Developed an in-house account and task tracking system for a consulting agency.

Additional Information

Robert Fischer’s Websites:

• My Company
• My Blog

Robert Fischer’s Interests:

programming paradigms, technical development methodologies, the open source movement, Web 2.0 business models, American football, Saint Paul Saints baseball, guitar

Robert Fischer’s Groups:

Object Technology User Group, Ruby Users of Minnesota, Groovy Users of Minnesota, Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons, Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, Twitter (RobertFischer)

•    Java Posse member
•    Twin Cities Software Consultants member
•    Tweeple member

Robert Fischer’s Honors:

- Member of the Ruby.MN "F1 Overnight Website Challenge" Team, which produced a full website for Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly in 24 hours.
- Sat on a "Dynamic vs. Static Typing" panel with Charles Nutter (JRuby committer) at the November 2007 meeting of the Object Technology User Group
- Featured in Newsweek article on "Googlegangers", and interviewed for radio's "In the Loop" on the topic of "Your Exposed Life"
- Presented on "Translating Geek with FIT" and "Agile Development with Functional Programming" at MinneBar 2007
- Presented on "Communication Technologies for Technical Teams" at the June 2007 meeting of the Object Technology User Group
- 2006 Time Person of the Year

Robert Fischer’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• consulting offers
• new ventures
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch