scripting & application integration/automation

Use of scripting technology in various implementations to expand current company technology limitations by the use of scripts (without additional investment of software).

(Never meant for this to evolve into an actual skill-set, but there always seems to be a reason to be able to make applications do more than they are designed to do, or to talk to other applications that they are not designed to talk to, and I've become quite fluent in it.) The length seems necessary to communicate the benefit.

8/1995 – 9/1998; Intercraft; C/S Information Specialist; Taylor, TX
(Excel/VBA/VBE):Created automated solutions to make departmental and extra-departmental tasks more efficient, including design, implementation, and maintenance of a report mining system which reduced the time to create the main operational report of the company from half a day of manual entry to half an hour. Wrote "bridge" scripts to interface with a TN3270 client, which allowed complex and repetitive tasks to be driven by Excel's VBA which made mass updates to data in a "dumb terminal" climate.

9/1998 – 7/2000; Sourcewright; Contractor; Pflugerville, TX
(Excel/VBA/VBE):Main client was Intercraft (above): Updated system to produce operational report, as company changes required (such as the acquisition of new companies); Updated "bridge" technique to use screen scraping, as implemented by Chameleon DLL, when they changed TN3270 clients. Provided a pseudo-scriptable environment that linked Excel to Chameleon, to replace any macros they had working previously in Rumba.

10/2000 – 1/2002; Datum, Inc; Jr Java Developer/Build Master; Pflugerville, TX
(Java/Ant): - counting this particular task as "scripting" because it was in the same spirit as the above - (While learning Java), wrote module to Ant to prevent PVCS from overwriting sourcecode when human mistake was made with check in/check out procedure. (By default, PVCS just over-wrote the newly coded updates.) Also while learning, wrote code to capture communication from network element that team was exploring requirements for coding against. This turned out to allow team to proceed with development when test hardware became unexpectedly unavailable.

5/2005 – 4/2008; Platinum Processing Services, Inc.; Austin, TX
(Excel/VBE):Designed spreadsheet / macro to convert data file to useful lookup table, in order to auto-populate spreadsheets based on transaction data.
(CygWin(bash)/AutoIt):Created bash script to process log dumped by proprietary ATM management program, in order to ultimately call script written in Auto-It designed to interface with proprietary program in order to automatically schedule an event with ATM that called in with error.
(CENTOS5(bash)):Created backup scripts designed to back up only changed files (using rsync) to a read-only network repository accessible to users at all times. Also created script to process specially formatted text files dropped in a specific network share by Windows clients so that they would be emailed automatically (via Mutt). This expanded automatic email notification for any script that generated such a file on any client in the network.
(Perl):Used perl to implement customized 'port knocking' capability in firewall, allowing remote access to company's internal network under very specific conditions, without needing to permanently open a port on the firewall.