Peter Leahy

A nimble custom ERP smart client application for a feed-milling business. This application has driven the digital transformation of the feed-mill business for more than a decade.

Designed specifically for a small development team to keep up with the pace of business, the modular design of the underlying framework handled all of the "plumbing," freeing up the developers to focus on designing a solution to the business problem. Heavy use of WPF templates and a Model-View-ViewModel design kept the project structure simple (only two code files for each business object) and easy to follow for new developers.

As the primary developer (working remotely), I designed and developed the framework as well as ported the initial business objects, handing more of the development off to the rest of the development team once the base code was in production.

A .Net framework application to run a 24-hour-per-day feed manufacturing plant. As the central orchestrator, the system handled order allocation, truck logistics, feed substitution and inventory, dynamic recipe formulation, and contamination sequence checking.

As the primary developer, I designed and built the system from business requirements. The system features deep integration with the single-mix recipe formulation system and ABB process control system.

Inherited an unmanaged software portfolio, a combination of in-house developed on-premise .Net applications (both web and smart clients), a legacy on-premise ERP, and an ever-increasing number of SaaS applications.

Leveraging various integration services within Azure and the Microsoft development stack, I set up the architecture to enable the integration across any app in the software portfolio (in-house or external) and a long-term, phased, in-house-built app modernization plan to the cloud.

This architecture plan covered naming standards and structure throughout the stack, from databases, logic apps, and app services in Azure through the CI\CD pipelines in Azure DevOps and solution naming and structure in visual studio and GitHub.

We targeted the Blazor server (waiting for WASM to mature) with an ASP.NET Core Web API back end on top of Azure SQL and targeting Enterprise PowerBI for reporting to leverage our investment in SSRS. This was secured using Azure AD for SSO.

As part of a suite of tools I wrote for the support department, this API reads the configuration management database (CMDB) from ServiceNow to build a dynamic hierarchical list of network devices. The service monitored the status of these devices via ICMP and alerted the service desk if there was an outage.

It was easy to assess the criticality of the outage as it would only show the top level of down devices and the number of devices affected below it. The API was very successful in helping the team start proactively monitoring the network and resolving some issues before the users were aware.