My Professional Background

I have an unusual background. I grew up in West Hartford, CT. I was a math prodigy in high school and was voted most likely to win the Nobel Prize for the Hall High School class of 2000, even though I didn’t graduate with my class. I ended up getting my GED and going to college for half a semester. Then I started working and found that I did a whole lot better when I didn’t have to do any homework. Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD, and now I can do things that held me back in school, like read (and write) a book. 

My first job was with IKON Office Solutions, where I started at the bottom and was promoted 5 times in 5 years, and I moved to Philadelphia for one of those promotions. While I wrote a lot of software for IKON, I didn’t become a full-time software engineer until I went to work for Digital Legal Services in 2008. In my first year at DLS, I wrote Electronic Discovery processing software that saved them $200,000 a year in licensing costs. This was also roughly the first 20,000 lines of code of what later became Minify, and I wrote the other 200,000 lines after moving back to CT, while working from home. 

This period of four years when I was working remotely was the most productive of my life, both professionally and personally. I got into outstanding physical condition, peaking in 2012, the year I did 4 triathlons, 4 road races, and a 103-mile charity bike ride. 

2013 wasn’t as good a year for me. I was signed up for a full ironman, but at the start of the year, Minify, LLC was formed to market my eDiscovery software. I was a minority partner in Minify, so I decided to give up my ironman training to put everything I had into my startup. Unfortunately, Minify started going downhill due to a dispute between the majority owners. I no longer felt optimistic about the startup, so I moved to Chicago and went to work for our top competitor, Relativity. 

Relativity was a fun place to work and I did very well there, but I wasn’t happy in Chicago. I didn’t like living in the city again, and after working from home for 4 years, I didn’t adjust well to going back to the office. I was making pretty good money, but I was sleeping on an air mattress and I had a couch made out of moving boxes. 

After a year at Relativity, the owners of Minify and DLS had split and I went back to work for one of them. Working for the renamed DLS Discovery from Chicago, I supported Minify for in-house use while I was working on a complete rewrite for a proposed startup software company.

While I was interested in the engineering and architectural aspect of the rewrite, I missed working with other talented software engineers and it was harder for me to get into rewriting 200,000 lines of code on my own. I had also become depressed in Chicago because I wasn’t that interested in writing eDiscovery software, but I wasn’t ready to give up on my life’s work and start over in another industry. So I left DLS Discovery after about a year.

As for the rest, the short version is that I took a break to pursue my own projects and am now on a mission to find a place where I can make an impact solving problems again. I would say that I could write a book about the longer version, but I already have. However, if you want to read more, the story continues at Doug Osborne DOES NOT QUIT.