About Me

As it says on the home page, I'm a late 20-something (28, to be exact, as of this writing) in the software industry in what is known as NY's Tech Valley.

In my current position, I'm a Technical Analyst (really a consulting position). On nights and weekends, I'm pursuing an MBA in IT Management from the University of Albany. In and around these activities, I spend time with my growing family (wife, dogs, child coming in November) and working on our home and yard (needs renovation badly!).

I use the term "software industry" because I've dabbled here and there with software and IT-related jobs/projects and so on. I have a good breadth of experience with technologies and platforms, with the majority of my experience being in the banking/financial transaction industry as well as healthcare and electronic medical records applications and databases.

I've done a number of web applications and websites using technologies like cold fusion, PHP, MySql, Apache, HTML, CSS, SQL Server, VB.NET, C#, SQL server, Visual Studio, Eclipse, and SVN code control. My favorite thing to do is minimize code. I like writing as little code as possible to provide the most output possible. In keeping with this, I've designed several websites with neat content management systems that allow content to be centralized and easily maintained. After all, what's a CMS for?

During my time in the EFT world (Electronic Financial Transaction), I worked intensively with C, Pro*C, Oracle, SQL, Oracle Forms, Intuit's API, XML, Unix/Linux, shell scripting, and CVS code control. A lot of my time here was spent searching through a large code base to analyze, root out, and resolve software issues for customers. Using a testing environment and tools I created for myself, I improved my own issue turn-around time by 50%. I also took on many customization projects, like turning a regular ATM into one that could handle multiple currencies.

During my entire time in this software industry (I count web design as software, yes I do!), which is about 9 years now, I've handled many-a project from cradle to grave. Requirements-gathering, resource coordination, application design, testing, UAT and support have become second-nature to me. In fact, I tend to like these aspects more than the actual coding and development of the software.

Being 28, my career is quite young and still developing. I intend to stay in the software and technology area through the rest of my life, and God willing, will be writing in this blog as I go along. If you have a software or technology blog and would like to exchange links, go for it! Email me at louis(dot)savalli(at)hotmail(dot)com (I wrote it that way to reduce the amount of spam I get).