Resume of Bill Nigh
Technical Writer, Blogger, Copy Editor, Interviewer, SQL Tutor, Course Developer and Trainer
Well-rounded and personable IT professional with exceptional communication and user acceptance-related
skills.
Content designer and creator. Author of user documentation, help features in various formats, training material, functional and technical specs. Contributor to Wikis. Creator of product videos.
Quick study, eminently flexible, adept at building successful business relationships
and meeting deliverables.
bill(dash)nigh(at)cdeis(dot)com
June 2012 - Present
Altegra, Mount Laurel NJ
Technical Writer
- Creating various forms of user-facing and internal documentation for major player in CMS space
- Working with Toad, Camtasia, Eclipse (SVN), Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Visio
- Got up to speed on industry parlance and workflow related to applications without impacting staff's time
September 2011 - June 2012
ADP, Roseland NJ
Technical Writer (sub-contractor)
- Created various forms of documentation for BI project
- Taught myself to read Cognos and Informatica source code, minimizing impact on developers' time
- Transcribed proceedings of important meetings from audio recording
- Took part in design sessions
- Worked with team members to create user acceptance tests and system/integration tests
- Documentation included user guide, runbooks for operations staff, functional requirements and design specifications
December 2010 - April 2011
Evident Software, Asbury Park NJ
Community Manager/Social Media Specialist
- Maintained presence on social media and industry sites such as Twitter, Facebook, DZone and YCombinator
- Grew Twitter network organically from 120 followers to near 600 in less than four months
- Created blog content to spec for long tail SEO strategy
- Edited and did voice overs of videos
- Helped write documentation (Quartz Manager)
October 2010 - December 2010
Sanofi-Aventis, Bridgewater NJ
Technical Writer (sub-contractor)
- Created technical documents for software release environment
- Worked in cross-functional enviroment, interfacing effectively with several teams within a short timeframe
- Created documentation in a timely fashion in strict adherance to SIMPLe methodology of client
- Using communications skills and finesse, able to obtain timely contributions from senior technical staff for documentation
November 2007 - July 2009
Bluenog Corp, Piscataway NJ
Technical Writer
- Created over 1600 pages of documentation, critical to success due to sparse nature of open source documentation
- Contributed to and proofread promotional literature; created sample data and CMS content types
- Did informal QA while learning apps for documentation, helping team catch errors in timely fashion
- Did training of new sales and technical employees
- Championed and maintained a corporate Glossary of buzzwords for sales and non technical staff
- Worked with Photoshop, Camtasia Studio, Google Docs, MediaWiki, Powerpoint, Confluence
and Dreamweaver
- Created Youtube videos product demonstrations, with voiceover, zoom, transitions, and callouts
November 2006 - October 2007
Policesoftware.com, Manalapan NJ
Technical Writer and Programmer(contractor)
- Provided strategic and product guidance to Director
- Did Quality Assurance for software products
- Did documentation of software products
- Enhanced business rules enforcement in non-visual objects
- Enhanced flexibility of applications with client-specific customization
- Provided candid feedback to client regarding user interface, design philosophy, and customer
service practices
- Architected new version of company website and created content
- Worked with PowerBuilder 10 and 11, PFC, custom class library, SQL, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Word, and Dreamweaver
- Took part in product demonstrations
April 2004 - October 2006
PXRE Inc, Edison NJ
Contract Technical Writer and Programmer (contractor)
- Part of team that created reinsurance application for new contracts pricing
- Clarified initially sketchy design specs using communications skills and persistent, diplomatic follow-up
- Architected context-sensitive HTML-based help system, weaving it into custom
PowerBuilder architecture
- Documented relevant project communications in support of Sarbanes-Oxley
reporting requirements
- Created hundreds of pages of technical and functional specs in HTML and Word format
- Derived FAQ section of user help while doing QA and documenting other developers' functionality
- Designed authentication/authorization system, grafting custom requirements onto existing
PFC security module
- Architected Job Scheduler service component, to import huge data sets and process them in Oracle DBMS
- Maintained a sizeable Oracle schema, synchronizing ER/Studio logical and physical models
with database server instance; produced reports on changes from week to week in all database
objects in schema
- Helped debug fellow developers’ code, e.g., a mutating tables problem in several
triggers
- Produced detailed knowledge transfer documents for smoother
handoff to my successor
- Took part in peer reviews of code, architecture, database objects
- Worked with PowerBuilder 9, Embarcadero DBArtisan 8.0 and ER/Studio 6.6, SQL*Plus, Photoshop,
Dreamweaver, Adobe Image Ready and XMLSpy
July 2003 – Feb 2004
Cendant Mortgage Services, Moorestown NJ
Support Programmer (contractor)
- Able to 'plug in' to an existing project, with aggressive timelines, to enhance mission
critical applications
- Worked with business analysts, DBAs and developers to ascertain requirements and enforce
business rules
- Utilized mature OO skills to modify application built using PowerBuilder, PFC, Cornerstone
and corporate class layers
- Created a centralized routine to enforce multiple nested business rules related to recission
logic across multiple parts of the UI , thus addressing long-standing, hard-to-isolate problems
- Developed and implemented a method of loosely coupling datasources with software components
- Maintained functions in Oracle packages for mortgage status and business partner communications
- Worked with PowerBuilder 7, TOAD, SQL*Plus, ERWin, and WebLogic, Oracle 8 RDBMS
Dec 2001 - Feb 2003
Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P), Montvale NJ
Applications Specialist
- Using PowerBuilder, Oracle and SQL Server, maintained and extended applications for corporate
brands tracking, store maintenance operations, construction project budgeting equipment acquisition
and store manager compensation using complex business rules realized in stored procedures
and PowerBuilder DataWindows
- Able to solve several long-standing complex application problems written in PowerBuilder
related to two levels of class libraries and business rules, winning back allegiance and
confidence of long-suffering end-users in multiple locations; was often able to solve end
users problems within a day
- Created new modules for feeding data from one application/database to another using a scheduled
Microsoft DTS job which successfully merged data from a single source into disparate data
sets, using an update based on a join
- Helped define queries which interrogated tables in two Oracle application schemas to help
Internal Audit staff identify changes to authorization profiles of hundreds of end-users
- Migrated PowerBuilder 5 application based on Cornerstone class libraries which had not
been migrated for years due to fatal errors during earlier attempted migrations. I
migrated the entire app painstakingly over several months, and made it work where others
had not. Only had to 'stub out' two inconsequential methods in the entire codebase
- Developed a number of reports for Eight O' Clock Coffee division using complex
queries custom views, scheduled server-level processes and Oracle Reports package to
track and report on performance of several product lines; reports were deployed to
application server and available over thin client interface; Java-based app server
was invoked to support functionality; had to read and change HTML code to help implement
- Worked on development of JSP and servlets for reporting on corporate intranet, using Visual
Age for Java, later Websphere Studio; also used Struts (I was not involved in design
of custom tags--just used them)
- Developed and led in-house classes on Java and PL/SQL; saved organization significant cost;
designed training to be relevant to fellow developers, many of whom were making transition
from mainframe 'legacy' mindset
- Using PL/SQL, Oracle UTL_FILE package, created a process which interrogated several tables
on a production system then generated HTML output to report on exceptions in important database
of store transactions
- Designed database, including triggers and stored procedures, for a generic survey application,
which permitted free-form sets of questions and default responses to each question;
this was then turned into HTML forms by a Java app; each respondent was given a unique
ID and responses to the surveys stored for later querying
- Researched, for a staff of 20, XML, Web Services, J2EE; published/summarized findings
on Sharepoint server
- Worked with:
- PowerBuilder versions 5.0 and 6.5
- Cornerstone, A&P corporate, and PFC class libraries
- Oracle SQL*Plus, TOAD, Query Builder, Schema Builder, Oracle Reports, Discoverer
- SQL Server Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer, bcp, Data Transformation Services, ASP
- AIX vi, awk, chmod, basic commands
- Java/XML javac, javadoc, Magic Draw, XML Spy Suite, Cooktop, Textpad, Visual Age
for Java, some Websphere
- Embarcadero Rapid SQL 5.7
- Cornerstone Class Library
- PowerTOOL Class Library
Sept 1997 - Dec 2001
Independent IT/Web Contractor, Course Developer and Trainer
President and Founder CDEIS, Inc. (incorporated 1999)
- (2001) Taught a semester at vocational-technical junior college (Gibbs College); taught
database for their programmer's curriculum; customized the instructional sequence in conformance
with students' interest and ability; mentored several of the students informally, even after
they had graduated
- (2000) Lead programmer in PowerBuilder 7/ Sybase 11.5 / Jaguar n-tier CORBA-compliant
application development team for Telecomm infrastructure firm, using DataWindow synchronization,
Powersoft Foundation Classes framework (PFC); also did end-user tutorials, windows-based
help system with RoboHelp and helped present / sell new features to end users in meetings
- (2000) In conjunction with local training company, offered several months of training on
Oracle, PL/SQL, AIX, Oracle Forms and Reports to management and employees of A&P, who were
undergoing mission-critical transition from mainframe environment to several Oracle-based
applications such as Retek; very well received; was called a 'hero' for my efforts; many
employees were long-time mainframers who had not thought in client/server mindset before
- (1999-2000) Designed several Web sites for small businesses, using NetObjects Fusion, Javascript,
HTML, Net Studio, other tools ; created content (verbiage, custom banners) as well
as navigation and pages
- (1998) Lead programmer in migrating AREV-based HR system for Chase Mellon Shareholder Services
to ADP HRizon application, on SQL Server database back-end; created a number of custom AREV
scripts to automate, ease and document the migration
- (1997-1999) Designed and authored, using PowerBuilder 6.0 and Microsoft SQL Server
6.5, a multi-lingual, object-oriented, modularized, and rules-based prototype for facilities
management
- Documented design with ERwin entity-relationship diagrams, UML sequence and interaction
diagrams
- Architected application to enforce user-defined business rules for validation of input
- Created my own non-visual objects for services architecture, and complete class libraries
for multi-lingual, rules-based, customer-responsive architecture
- Rich right-click functionality allowed administrator users to add to support tables while
within the context of the application subject area, rather than having to constantly go
to a separate 'maintenance' area of the app
- Solved how to provide multiple languages in all text objects, command buttons, DataWindow
columns/labels
- (1997-1998) Authored and taught very successful Transact-SQL course, offered three times
over two years, on Sybase Adaptive Server 11.5 to analysts working for leading Financial
house in Manhattan; users were acquainted with introductory and intermediate queries, as
well as isql batches using queries and host variables
- (1997-2001)Working as contractor for Chubb Institute, Chubb CTD/PSD and Chubb's "Top
Gun" taught Oracle, SQL, Sybase, Javascript, Dynamic HTML, HTML, PowerBuilder,
RDBMS, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, Distributed Application Development, others;
provided approximately 3000 person-days of instruction in at least 10 locations
Mar 1996 - Sept 1997
Modis at the time Actium, formerly ITI (HQ in Conshohocken PA), Liberty Corner, NJ
Senior Staff Consultant
- Worked on forecasting, sales and cost accounting apps for 3 large consumer products/pharmaceuticals
companies
Used stored procedures and custom Powerbuilder objects to address complex reporting needs
- Also did user and technical documentation, training material and technology transfer to
client staff
- Designed and delivered internal classes on PowerBuilder and Object Orientation; while
prepping for PowerBuilder Certification, 'paid it forward' by sharing with teammates what
I was learning using short, efficient presentations to promote knowledge transfer
- Worked with PowerBuilder 4.0 and 5.0, Microsoft SQL Server 4.2 and 6.0, and Oracle 7.3
Sept 1987 - Mar 1996
Cogent Information Systems (later IDEAS International), Livingston, NJ
Programmer / Course Developer / Trainer
- Developed over 20 technical courses, of average 3 day duration (SQL, Revelation and AREV)
- Worked with users and programmers within an international client base representing almost
all of the big Oil and Gas companies in the world, using an accounting package originally
written by Price Waterhouse
- Created and customized flat file applications, typically at departmental level,
often HRIS apps
- Created and delivered several presentations at international conferences (AREV and IDEAS)
- Authored several articles for technical journals in AREV and PowerBuilder communities
Education
- BA, History, Rutgers University
- MA, International Relations, University of Southern California (cum laude)
- Certificate, Systems Management, University of Maryland ( 9 credits )