It took no effort at all to discover my dad’s big lie. Mom was confused, angry, violent… she had dementia. He kept this secret from his children for reasons I can’t comprehend. My wife, sister-in-law, and niece took care of her while dad recovered in a hospital. How they tolerated her nasty words and violent outbursts is nothing short of amazing.

My wife is an RN, and quickly realized my parents needed more help than we could provide, even after I left my job, so we moved them into an assisted living facility. Those places are expensive, like three times the cost of a mortgage on a good-sized single family home! We didn’t have a choice, and I assume others who experienced family dementia understand why they couldn’t keep living in their home without 24 hour monitoring.

When we cleaned out their house, I cataloged all the repairs it required, and there were a lot. I spent the next year and a half doing the best I could to get their house into shape for sale. During this time, last year in fact, my mother passed away from complications due to diabetes and dementia, leaving my dad alone in a facility that was only necessary because of mom.

Earlier this year I put dad’s home up for sale. To say I misjudged the housing market is an understatement. It didn’t sell, and now he’s out of money. I’m out of money as well. Next month, if it hasn’t sold, I’ll be moving him back into his house, but the repairs, and managing mom, has nearly bankrupted me. Luckily, my wife is still working.

I’d love to be a programmer or database person again, but I’m at an age where I’m no longer wanted in those fields. It won’t take much to right this ship. I just need to make a little per month to slowly reverse the financial damage this caused. I’m thinking… McDonald’s. We have a good history.

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Most of my efforts lately are centered around writing SEO friendly content for WordPress powered websites. I also create complex, database driven WordPress plugins that can do pretty much anything you want. My plugin PHP skills are insanely good and thorough, particularly so at my low hourly rate.

What’s my hourly rate? Well, it all depends on you. If you’re unrealistic and hyper-demanding, I’m going to be quite expensive. If you’re cool, I’m cheaper than most, if not all, of the highly skilled local developers you can find. No, I won’t compete dollar-for-dollar with Easter European, African, Chinese, or Indian developers. If you want to go cheap, that’s on you. Good luck. Fiverr is the place to look for that.

Unlike my foreign counterparts, I’ll meet with you, in person, at your office or a business of your choice (I really like coffee). I’ll even get with you to demonstrate updates on our ongoing project, if it’s a big one. Of course, this offer is only for businesses in the Jacksonville or Saint Augustine region of Northeastern Florida.

I’m competent in C#, PHP, and I can write Java, but it’s been a while. My T-SQL and overall database knowledge is legendary (in my own mind). Check out my career history for more information.

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When I started here, it was called American Heritage Life Insurance. I guess Allstate bought them, but that transition is a blur.

The programming department at this division was huge. There had to be almost twenty of us, and that was just the programming staff. They had a dedicated testing department, and a full graphics development team. They even had a separate department for database administration. Allstate was the largest technology team I ever worked with, even to this day.

This job taught me a lot. I was first introduced to deep SQL (Database) development here, like views, indexes, stored procedures. They showed me the importance of performance minded code. My disturbing love for database development began at Allstate.

Allstate catapulted me into a more rounded understand of the inner-working of business. I was thrown into the deep end of knowledge about privacy, HIPAA compliance, disconnected data, documentation, meetings, encryption, screen scraping, and bureaucracy… so much bureaucracy. Things moved so fast, most of it is an obfuscated mess.

After two years, they placed me on a special projects team focused on rewriting their legacy Visual Basic code into the new C# development platform. That was a steep learning curve, and I’m a much better developer because of it.

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From my home, I could walk to the Saint Johns River, and the Atlantic Ocean is less than a thirty-minute car ride away. There are parks, city, county, state, and federal, everywhere. You can’t drive ten minutes without passing a park or two. Most of them are pretty nice. I used to drive my car to a park for lunch and write my book. Arguably, Saint Augustine (just to the south) is a nicer city with more touristy things, but it’s microscopic by comparison.

I’m not much of a sports fan, but Jacksonville has an NFL team, the Jaguars, and a minor-league baseball team, the Jumbo Shrimp (seriously), and minor-league hockey team, the Icemen. Between the bustling river life and sports, Jacksonville has something for everyone. There are three libraries within ten miles of my home, one close enough to ride a bike.

Do children play outside anymore? If they do, it seems like this city was built around the idea of entertaining kids, and beer guzzling adults.

There is one place in town I haven’t visited yet, but I think about it a lot. Jaxport. It’s a huge cargo and cruise ship port. There’s something about port cities, Like Savannah Georgia, about the massive ships that affects me deep down inside.

Oh yeah, there’s a farmers market… like all the time, everywhere.

While I’m mostly a self-imposed shut-in, I do love Jacksonville.

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Company: SuperStock, Inc.
Location: Jacksonville, FL
Industry: Online Stock Photography
Duties: VB.Net and C# developer. Database Developer. Database Administrator.

SuperStock was a fun company to work for, until the Venture Capitalists took over. I have to be careful here because the VC in charge literally threatened to sue me for $600,000 when I (allegedly) hurt his (alleged) feelings. I still have the paperwork. His (alleged) lawyer was terrible (in my opinion) and easily manipulated (in my opinion). I hope that VC (alleged) guy fired his (alleged) loser lawyer.

Now, back to SuperStock pre-VC. My primary function at SuperStock was maintaining a high performance, replicated, database server. We had millions of stock photos and videos with tens of millions of search tags. It was my responsibility to ensure searches came back with relevant results, and in sub-second time.

There was a lot of older ASP code that needed to be upgraded to the new (at the time) Microsoft ASP.Net platform. My duties included rewriting and testing code as well as developing the system to tag photos. AI would have been nice and very helpful back then.

I worked at the company for three years with no issues… until the VCs reared their (allegedly) ugly heads. Bridge burned.

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Childhood

Adrian was born November 30th, 1968 in a small, at the time, town east of San Francisco, California. When he was six, his family fell on hard financial times and moved to suburban Minneapolis. While his father worked multiple jobs to keep his family fed, they hopped around the Twin Cities metropolitan area for the next twelve years. They never living in the same place for long.

Uprooted at every important stage of his early development, finding and keeping friends was difficult. During his middle school years, the world was on the cusp of a global technological revolution, the introduction of personal computers. Attracted to their limitless potential, Adrian taught himself to write computer code by dissecting existing games, rewriting them, and making them better…in his personal opinion. Developing software became his drug of choice, and that addiction persists to this day.

Adult Years

In the nineteen-nighties, he married his high school girlfriend, and they began their family soon after. Minnesota winters took their toll on him and his wife, so they followed his retired parents to Jacksonville Florida and settled down just south of the city. There, he vowed to let his children grow up without the distress of abandoning friends that made his young life so miserable.

Starting in his teens, he dabbled with writing on and off, but never applied any serious focus to it. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic shook our world, and changed everything. His once vibrant office culture assumed a morbid, lonely darkness. Businesses faltered. Nothing felt stable anymore. It was in this chaos he, like thousands of others, wrote a book.

Still a software developer today, but mostly in the field of database design and performance, Adrian is a published author, an aging father, a dog owner, and a resourceful jack of all trades.

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