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TGE Software

This page is intended to serve several purposes:

To introduce myself to the Retail Pro partner community

To assist that community with my knowledge of the Retail Pro products

To encourage the growth of the Retail Pro ecosystem

You can go directly to the TGE Software by clicking here or on the car.

(TL;DR: What I can do for you)

Retail Pro 8 & 9

Coming into the company, one of the first things I was tasked with was creating plug-ins for V8 and designing a new customization layer for V9. Within the constraints I was given for designing it, my approach to the V9 customization layer was to satisfy the 95th percentile and maximize effectiveness by simply opening up access to all business objects at the lowest level. That allowed us to get to market quickly with the most functionality. The hardest part of that effort is probably the least used, the plug-in datastore functions.

I immediately got a chance to eat my own dog food when I leveraged the customization layer to build interfaces to OPOS hardware devices. Retail Pro 9 uses the PIAPI to abstract the interface to point of sale devices, and the plug-ins we created up front talked to OPOS drivers for cash drawers, bar code scanners, line displays, etc.

I also taught a class to the development partners, explaining the difference between the V8 and V9 customization interfaces and the advantages and power of the V9 approach. In doing that I created a ski rental customization that illustrated how to hook into the guts of V9 to inject logic into the V9 workflow.

Retail Pro Prism

When it came time to build a new product line, I and two other developers were tapped to figure out what that would look like. We settled on REST as the interface methodology and committed to making it database agnostic. We also built in an RPC facility, but as a matter of policy we discouraged the developers from using it unless absolutely necessary. And, of course, we embraced unit testing, if not test driven design, immediately.

At the time we started it, the Embarcadero Datasnap framework was new and had serious issues, and their JSON support was just plain broken, so I decided to roll my own REST framework that was tailored to how Retail Pro builds software. I brought in code that I had developed a long time ago for multi-database support and wrote a set of serializer classes that would allow us to switch between XML and JSON as the payload format. I built an interface that allows a consumer to get just about anything they need from any resource, without being tied to pre-built SQL statements or database-specific stored procedures.

The decisions we made to go with a stateless, full-featured API paid off huge. The load time and performance of the web services rival that of the monolithic V8 and V9 systems, and the flexibilty from the perspectives of both the business logic coder and the API consumer made development on that product a breeze.

Custom Work

That project was a HUGE learning experience, and I want to make my expertise available to the Retail Pro community. I am available for contract work on any of the Retail Pro products, and I would love to help existing development partners get a leg up on moving their customizations to Prism.

You can contact me at 209-679-2802, or email me at todd@tgesoft.com

Skills

I've worked on a lot of different projects, and I've picked up experience with wide variety of technologies along the way. This quick list isn't comprehensive, so if there's something you don't see here, ask me about it.

It's worth mentioning that, in some cases, the experience is cumulative, broken up over several projects at different times. For instance, I've been using Javascript for at least 12 years, but I've only undertaken really complex projects with it in the last 4 years.

Languages
Skill Name	Skill Level	Last Used	Experience
Java	Advanced	current	20 yrs
Javascript	Advanced	current	6 yrs
Delphi	Expert	current	25 yrs
HTML	Advanced	current	15 yrs
CSS	Intermediate	current	9 yrs
PHP	Advanced	current	9 yrs
C#	Intermediate	current	5 yrs
C	Intermediate	11 yrs ago	2 yrs
C++	Beginner	11 yrs ago	1 year
Arduino	Intermediate	4 yrs ago	2 yrs
Tcl/tk	Beginner	18 yrs ago	1 yrs
VAX/Basic	Advanced	23 yrs ago	5 yrs
80x86 Assembler	Intermediate	23 yrs ago	2 yrs
COBOL	Intermediate	29 yrs ago	2 yrs
Fortran	Beginner	30 yrs ago	2 yrs
IBM 370 Assembler	Beginner	30 yrs ago	2 yrs

Development Tools
Skill Name	Skill Level	Last Used	Experience
Delphi IDE	Expert	current	30 yrs
Eclipse	Advanced	current	15 yrs
IntelliJ	Intermediate	current	1 yr
Android Studio	Intermediate	current	1 yr
Maven	Intermediate	current	10 yrs
Gradle	Beginner	current	1 yrs
KDiff3	Intermediate	current	10 yrs
npm	Intermediate	current	2 yrs
JMeter	Intermediate	current	<1 yr
Selenium	Beginner	current	<1 yr
JUnit	Intermediate	current	2 yrs
DUnit	Advanced	current	12 yrs
NUnit	Intermediate	current	6 yrs

Frameworks, Servers, Distributed Systems, and Related Technologies
Skill Name	Skill Level	Last Used	Experience
Spring/Hibernate	Beginner	current	1 yr
AngularJS	Intermediate	current	4 yrs
Express/Node	Beginner	3 yrs ago	1 year
Android	Advanced	current	5 yrs
J2EE	Advanced	current	7 yrs
JAX-RS	Intermediate	current	2 years
Apache	Intermediate	current	14 yrs
Struts/Tiles	Intermediate	14 yrs ago	2 yrs
TomEE	Beginner	current	1 year
EJB	Intermediate	4 yrs ago	4 yrs
JDBC	Advanced	current	14 yrs
XML	Expert	current	13 yrs
XSLT	Advanced	current	3 yrs
DOM	Intermediate	current	5 yrs
JSON	Advanced	current	9 yrs
HTTP	Expert	current	12 yrs
COM/ActiveX	Expert	current	7 yrs
REST	Expert	current	7 yrs
RPC	Expert	current	7 yrs
SOAP	Intermediate	current	7 yrs
JSP	Expert	6 yrs ago	2 yrs
NetDynamics	Intermediate	14 yrs ago	1 year
CGI	Intermediate	2 yrs ago	2 yrs
CORBA	Intermediate	15 yrs ago	1 year

Databases
Skill Name	Skill Level	Last Used	Experience
MySQL	Advanced	current	15 yrs
MS SQL Server	Advanced	current	8 yrs
Oracle	Intermediate	current	15 yrs
SQLite	Intermediate	current	2 yrs
MS Access	Intermediate	current	2 yrs
Informix	Intermediate	20 yrs ago	1 year
Btrieve	Expert	14 yrs ago	10 yrs
Pervasive SQL	Expert	14 yrs ago	1 year
DEC RMS	Expert	20 yrs ago	5 yrs

Operating Systems
Skill Name	Skill Level	Last Used	Experience
Windows	Expert	current	27 yrs
Linux	Intermediate	current	12 yrs
MSDOS	Expert	current	30 yrs
Unix	Intermediate	20 yrs ago	1 year
Novell	Intermediate	28 yrs ago	1 year
Sun/Solaris	Intermediate	20 yrs ago	2 yrs

Graphics
Skill Name	Skill Level	Last Used	Experience
Print Shop Pro	Expert	current	12 yrs
GIMP	Intermediate	current	1 year
Blender	Beginner	current	1 year
Xara 3D	Advanced	current	12 year

Virtualization
Skill Name	Skill Level	Last Used	Experience
VMWare	Intermediate	current	15 yrs
Virtual PC	Intermediate	current	10 yrs
Docker	Beginner	current	1 yr

Source Control
Skill Name	Skill Level	Last Used	Experience
Mercurial	Intermediate	current	10 yrs
Git	Intermediate	current	1 yrs
VSS	Intermediate	5 yrs	10 yrs

Industries
Industry	Systems	Since	Experience
Retail	POS, inventory, customer management, EFT, customizations	current	15 yrs
Mobility	Front-end integrations to legacy systems	current	4 years
Healthcare	Social media	3 yrs	less than 1 year
Health and Human Resources	Fiduciary and case management	20 yrs	5 yrs
Shipping	Manifests, tracking, billing, web services	25 yrs	5 yrs
Medical	Patient accounting, medical records, clinicals	30 yrs	5 yrs
Real Estate	Sale tracking, customer tracking, mapping, integrations	30 yrs	2 yrs
Call center	Statistics, reporting	35 yrs	1 yr

Methodologies

• Agile development
• Unit testing
• Test driven development
• Behavior driven development
• Continuous integration

Miscellaneous

As a hobby I tinker with electronics. Using the Arduino hobby board platform I've programmed ATmega microcontrollers in conjunction with XBee tranceivers and various sensors to create motion/range detectors, motor drivers, etc. While my first electronics project didn't involve an Arduino, it allowed me to use my phone to open my garage door.

One on-going project, which I get to when I can, involves reusing HP printer parts -- the motors and sensors -- to build robots on the cheap. This requires writing drivers for the various motors, which is always a challenge since each motor seems to operate differently, but it's so cool when you see them operating.

My latest project, though, is to build a 3D printer from scratch. Back in the day, the best projects for researching 3D printing were being tracked by Hackaday, and I always wanted to build one, but didn't have the time. One of my resolutions for this upcoming year is to finally build one. I might cheat and reuse the 3Doodler I got my daughter as the print head. If I ever get to that, I'll post pictures and videos of the progress.

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Copyright (c)2014, 2018 Todd Grigsby, all rights reserved