About Brent
Overview
Brent has been writing software since at least the 90s. Maybe even the 80s, if you count playing around with making MS-DOS 6 batch file based games. He really dug in deep during the late 90s with making all kinds of small apps that interacted using Win32 APIs with various online services like America Online and more. This experience in making apps and distributing them via his own websites ended up landing him a professional job just before graduating high school. His career since has been solving various challenging problems at only a handful of companies, all aligned in some way with medical software. The more technical and deep into the guts of the system, the more heās likely to be asked to solve it and enjoy doing so!
The Early Years
I was born in 1981, so really just at the start of the personal computer era. The Apple II was already around for a few years, and the IBM PC had come out a few months before I was born. Like a lot of things, the timing was right.
You might think that I come from a techie family, but my father was actually a Dallas Firefighter and my mother did crafts and things like that until she eventually pursued becoming a nurse. The rest of my extended family is kind of the same, and nobody was involved in any kind of tech. But my dad is a verify curious fellow. He does everything, pursues a lot of hobbies, and was responsible for getting me started by bringing home a computer.
TI-99
The TI-99 was a computer that was made by Texas Instruments. It was a small silver box with a keyboard and a cartridge slot. You could load games through cartridges or through a cassette tape player. Yeah, a computer that you stored programs on tapes ā¦ regular old cassette tapes! I donāt think Iāll ever forget the sounds that you would hear while loading a game.
I didnāt get into writing software at this time, but it was the technology was both fascinating and alluring. This was my first introduction to any kind of computing.
DOS Batch Games
Oh how I wish this wasnāt all lost to time. We finally got a real IBM Compatible PC ā¦ a real COMPUTER! I was around 9 or 10 years old when we got this system. It couldnāt do much, and I couldnāt really tell you the specs for it, but it could run DOS and allow us to play some games. It had QuickBASIC and a few simple things in that.
I didnāt do much in QuickBASIC, but I did find both Gorillas and Nibbles to be fascinating. These games were fun and yet the magical code that made them work seemed so short and simple! I never fully grasped exactly how they worked due to some of the complexities of rendering graphics and me being a kid, but it did spur me to do a little playing around with what I could do.
I could write simple text based games in DOS Batch files. I donāt really know how I got into this, but clearly I found some inspiration and enough details to get going. I found sound commands that could be used to make rudementary music and effects. I was able to put this together and amuse myself with making what Iām sure were pretty awful Choose Your Own Adventure style games.
Unfortunately, everything I did in my younger years was lost when the computer eventually had a hard drive issue and all was wiped with no backups. A life lesson for sure!
America Online and Progs
The Internet really became a big deal in the mid nineties. Windows 95 was released by Microsoft and businesses were all onboard for the push to get America connected. Leading on that front was America Online (AOL). They offered a product that went far beyond just getting connected. Their software was an entire platform of online tools and services, including email, chat rooms, news, and more.
Using AOL generally meant going to any local big box store and getting a copy of an AOL disk or CD. You could then install their client software and get connected. In my teenage years, this software not only opened up the doors to the internet for me, but to the broader possibilities of what could be done on a computer.
There was this scene at the time of what I think were mostly similar aged kids. Teens with too much time in the summers and evenings. I was just one of many, and not a notable one. But it was too fascinating to avoid being drawn in.
I didnāt even have a computer of my own when it started. I was joining my father on trips to a womanās house whom he would eventually marry and become my incredible step mother. And she had a computer ā¦ with AOL!
While they would spend time with each other, I would get to spend some time on the computer. I could login and play games, but I could also go into the chat rooms. And in those rooms, I would sometimes see someone enter and scroll out fancy colored text messages about busting into the room.
You see, these chat rooms could get full. There were only so many people who would be allowed into an instance of a room at a time. Eventually someoone is going to leave a room instance and thatās a chance for someone else to enter that room. A room buster was a program that would repeatedly keep trying to enter a room until it finally got that brief chance after someone left and was able to pop you in there. On entry, they would typically scroll out some chat message about what program busted in and how long it took.
This messaging caught my attention and I had to know how a program could interact with another program like that. I wanted to know how people were making such software. I found out they were mostly being written in Visual Basic and used API modules that were being shared around. I had my answer, but I just had to learn how to do it myself.
Taking copies of source code to these types of programs that were shared around, and using a totally legitimately acquired copy of Visual Basic, I was able to start studying the code to learn. I didnāt have books, there was no YouTube, and if there was a better way to learn then I didnāt know what that was. I just loaded up the source I had, ran a build, and saw that it worked.
The next step was piecing through it to see if any of it made sense and then modify that. I broke it. I fixed it back, and then broke it again. This trial and error was basically how I really began my true learning of software development. It was pretty much how I spent my days and nights during those long summer school breaks in the heat of Texas. I would mimic the things I saw and liked in other programs and worked at it until I was both very confident and capable.
Going Pro
As part of wanting to write and release software, I picked up on additional skills. I was creating art for my applications, websites for distributing them, and experimenting with other languages like C/C++, PERL, and Action Script (Adboe Flash).
My stepmother was an amazing and ambitious nurse. She had worked with a production company to produce her own video for Infant Emergencies that she was going to be selling on Amazon. But she also needed a website for her product, and thatās where I came in. I created the website for her video and she of course shared that around to her wide network of people she knew through her career in nursing.
One of these nurses had moved on to work as a clinical advisor, an important role for advising on software features, and was employed at a local company making emergency department software. This company, MedHost Inc, proved to be very generous at interviewing a young guy who hadnāt even graduated high school yet. They brought in this clueless (to the business world) and poorly dressed teenager to have a formal interview.
The timing worked well for me to accept a low ball offer. Although I was still in high school, I had already turned 18 and would soon be graduating. I also went to a school where I had an option to finish out the year of classes ahead of the actual end of the year. I was at that cross road where I couldāve looked into college and pursued that route, gone a completing different direction, or tried to take whatever offer I could to get in the door. It was that last option that I ended up taking. $12/hour, but I was in the door, and making slightly more than what I was already making doing ISP phone support for dial-up and DSL internet providers.
The next couple of decades
Itās wild to be writing a title talking about decades for me, but that is the point Iām at in my career already. Part of what makes it a surprise to be that far along is that I have not exactly career hopped very much.
Following my director that I really liked and respected, I left MedHost and went to what would eventually become CVS Caremark. This was almost exactly one year from going professional, but there was a round of layoffs and then that director I worked under had some run in with management and decided to leave. This is just how it goes sometimes in the software world.
Jumping ships introduced me to an entirely different way of doig computing and software development. This new company, AdvancePCS, was doing software development on an almost-mainframe (midrange) system known as the IBM AS/400. This was a system of green screens, advanced terminal command prompting, incredible job management, database as a fundamental operating system feature, and a library based object storage system as opposed to the normal PC file systems.
I was constantly tasked with different needs and didnāt know what the word ānoā was. As a result, I was less focused on being highly skilled in anyone one thing and was just a very reliable generalist. I think my being self-taught was a major factor here because it gave me the confidence to know that I could figure out whatever came my way. I created more tools than I can possibly remember for all kinds of things over the years. A few of them really stand out in my mind and were a blast to create.
At one point, the NCPDP telecommunication format (the format used by pharmacies to send information to insurance processors) was being updated and we needed a way of testing it. I was asked if I could create some kind of tooling for this. I took this as an opportunity, back in 2003, to create a PHP website and learn PHP as well. It only took 80 hours to create doznes of pages, a database system, and a tool that made the format generic and fully configurable. This tool not only could accommodate that change, but it went on to handle other future changes without needing code rewrites, just configuration that you could do through the interface. A smashing success that I think may still be in use there today.
Another one that I really enjoyed was when the business was being forced to abandon the Rhumba terminal emulator in favor of another one. The business made use of a macro functionality that existed for creating quick and simple macros that could automate data entry and extraction. I created a C++.NET application that was able to hook into the process of the new emulator, inject its own menu, and provide a .NET form GUI that offered essentially the same macro functionality that they had lost.
Although I have since changed companies, I have continued to do similar kinds of work. I create lots of utilities for various needs all the time. I really enjoy some of the deeper technical work that Iāve had to do. Iāve created performance metrics reporting systems, real time data change capture tech, and even got to lead our efforts to build a brand new modernized Java based adjudication system, amongst so many other things.
Other hobbies
Outside of software development, I grew up as a somewhat athletic kid. I was playing soccer from 6 to 16 (when I got a car and a job to pay for it), a near annual snow skier, and always up for the challenge of anything else new and exciting. Iāve been working full time remote since 2013, and after getting married in 2018, my wife and I decided to push the boundaries and sold everything.
We bought a 5th wheel RV and F350 dually truck to tow it. Weāve been to every US State and stayed in our RV in each of the contiguous 48 states. This has been an inredible journey that we have documented on our YouTube channel
Iāve found that I really love shooting videos and editing them. There has never been a better time to try this out with all of the affordable video capture tech and cheap or free editors.