My Work Related History

A brief work history of Anthony Amolochitis

When I was 19 or 20, I was working at Baker Hughes as a warehouse employee. After being on the night shift for about a year, I figured it was time to start college to get out of this nightmare of a job. I started with an accounting course to give it a try. I ended up not liking the course at all. It was boring.

So I attempted to enroll into the networking program in fall of 1999. Thankfully I was able to get a student job at the school. I earned a ton of hardware experience as a student worker. Denny Scott was my boss there. He allowed us student workers to learn as much as we wanted. We rebuilt, ghosted, and setup/re-setup all the computers in the labs every semester. After about a year in the networking program, I noticed I really enjoyed my math and programming courses, so I spoke with my programming teacher, Ms. Gail Mason. She told me I should enroll in the computer science program instead since I liked those two subjects. So that is what I did.

After about a year into that program, I was in need of making some more money. I went to the college job center and found a job opportunity at International Mailing Systems, Inc. They are now called Premier IMS. The owner was Norm Pegram. He is the type of guy that will give people a chance to prove themselves. He interviewed me, and then his employee John Witson interviewed me. Two weeks later I was hired. This was June 2, 2001.

Initially, I started just learning about the company. It was a mail company only at the time, but it eventually grew into a print, mail, and fulfillment company. Anyways, I started working on a bunch of file conversions, and mail merge setups. We used Dbase as the software to setup the databases for mail merge to the inkjets, or the label printers. All of it was command prompt with blue screen and yellow text. Eventually we upgraded to Visual FoxPro 6.0. Man, that was a big improvement. It seems just like Visual Basic as the time, and I loved to code in VB in my courses.

So I grew an interest in the language. I began spending my spare time reading the help manual that was built into the IDE, and started writing programs in Visual FoxPro. I got pretty good at it and the Department noticed. Mike Arnett asked me to rewrite a system that the company was using to manage all the addresses in the state of Texas. It was written in Dbase. First I had to write components of the system and upgrade the system in phases.
1. File updating system
2. User Interface to report and order lists from the system
3. Server To Process Requests/Orders for the lists
4. User Interface for data processing to wrap process up

It was a success. I turned a 2 day update process into a 45 minute process on my first try. I eventually merged the separate components into one system, and improved efficiency of the processing. Update took around 8 minutes to complete when I finished the third version of the Resident System. I also created a bunch of other small programming tools too. Here are some that I still remember. Obviously I had numerous random one time projects as well.

1. Their Order Fulfillment System
Inventory management system that allow their clients to log in and ship out
inventory in the warehouse quickly.
2. Order Management System
Managed all orders for the company, including invoices.
3. The Appender
A relational database utility written in FoxPro 6.0. It would append data from
one database to the other.
4. The Aggregator
Reverse relation database utility used with digital imaging setup that does not
have the capability to manage relational tables.
5. Purl Data Generator
Converts a FoxPro data file into a MySQL Database for Purl/QR websites.
6. File Splitter
Splits files by codes, record count, etc…

After 10 years at Premier IMS, I eventually decided that it was time to go on a new path. I needed a new challenge. I obtained a job at a company called Genesis Marketing, but they go by the name of Hitman Direct. They interviewed me, and I got the job. The goal was to help organize the company information, and build a smart mail tracking system to improve their automotive mail. They had no computer infrastructure whatsoever. Their orders were taken on paper, and stored in a filing cabinet. Copies of the order were created and distributed so that all could know which orders were available. Imagine the disorder that could arrive when it becomes busy.

Anyways, I was tasked with creating a smart mail tracking system with little to no budget. So I downloaded Netbeans, WAMP, and Open Office. Then, I had the company purchase a CentOS Linux Virtual Server from WooServers for $30 a month and went to work. I installed Webmin, on it to make it easier to setup the Linux server. I then altered the .htaccess file to accept sub-domains and rebuild them as urls to prep for the Purl/QR Code tracking. About 3 or 4 weeks of coding later I began testing on the live server. I was asked to show one of the owners the tests for proof of concept, and they were happy. The next day, the owner’s daughter sold it’s usage in the infant stage of it’s development. I was thinking I had a few weeks to get something going, but she said I had 3 to 4 days until the mail that she sold needed to be dropped. I was literally shocked about the timeline to completion. But I went ahead and busted my hump to get it done for them.

In three days, I set up the bare minimum so that tracking would work, but all the setup was manual. I converted the mail list to a dbf file, ran an ad-hoc fox-pro script to apply tracking codes to a list, and then it would convert the dbf file to a MySQL insert statement so that it could be imported straight into the MySQL database for tracking. Again and again, the sales staff began to sale this product. I knew what was going to happen even though I was promised it wouldn’t happen. A serious system slowdown was soon to come, and it did.

After about six months, complaints began to come in. I knew what was causing the slowdown. It was several factors. For one, the server was running on 2Gb Ram. It was tracking over 2 million pieces of mail. Dealers were working their leads in the lead editor, and notifications were being sent from the same server. The solution was simple to conceive but would take much work on my part to implement, and understanding from the upper management to allow me to dedicate more time towards software development to get it done.  Even though there is much to say on what needed to be done, here were the basics.

1. Get a dedicated server for the customer databases. Each customer would shard out it’s own database for table storage.
2. Get a virtual server and setup a message notification queue system on it. Setup cron jobs to send email notifications out on schedule, plus other tasks as needed.
3. House the application on a separate virtual server, which is the original server it was on, and upgrade it to 8Gb Ram.

Executing the solution was difficult. I had to migrate a year’s worth of tracked data over to a completely new database with a totally different database and table structure setup. I wrote a script to do the migration of the data. It took three to four months to complete the project.  Of that I spent about 1-2 months testing it. One Sunday morning I went to work, and began the upgrade process, including the migration of the all the previous data the older system collected while it was running. After migration was over, I replaced all php scripts with the new scripts, and bam!  The update went smooth.  I couldn’t believe it.  I had almost no issues.  After about 3-4 hours of testing I went home happy. The new lead tracking system was upgraded.

Eventually, it was time for a new beginning in my life, so I put in my resignation letter. My last day was set for March 31, 2014. I decided that it was best for me to go back to school and pursue my masters or phd degree back at University of Houston Main Campus.  Though I was leaving the company, I left a nice system for the company. It did the following.

1. Lead Tracking for automotive mail via Purl, Qr Codes, IVR, SMS, and Live Call center.

2. Order Management System to manage orders that were entered by the sales force. It also, had a validation object that made sure orders had the proper data entered into them before they could move to the next status.

3. Lead Management System that allowed dealers to log in and see a list of their campaigns. In those campaigns they could see statistics on the performance, and access there leads to attempt to sell more cars. Call center leads even had recordings attached to them so the dealers could listen to the calls. It was a great system.

4. Process Automation of tracking setup. This was a manual process that was integrated into the order management system. This allowed for an upload of a list, then it was coded and put into a type of queue. From there it was moved to the customer database where it sat until tracking was completed. Upon completion, the data was removed properly.

Well this concludes a brief work history of my life from 1997-2014. I left some things out due to the fact I had other jobs as well.  In fact, I was a part time math tutor at San Jacinto College North since 2004.  I just listed my work history that led me into the field of computer science. I hope you enjoyed reading it. If you would like to see my resume, there is a link above to go to it.  Have a nice day.