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About GeodSoft
George D. Shaffer resides in Alexandria, VA.
GeodSoft (George Shaffer) may be contacted if
you fix:
Capsule Resume After a few year hiatus from art, George Shaffer completed a two year Commercial Art degree graduating Summa Cum Laude from Northern Virginia Community College. He won the grand prize in the illustration category of the metropolitan competition, open to all Washington area college and university art students, sponsored by the Washington Art Directors Club. His work was selected for inclusion in the national competition, sponsored by the New York Society of Illustrators. As a freelance illustrator, his clients included the Washington Post and the Washington Star, the prominent Washington advertising agencies, Earl Palmer Brown, Kal Merrick and Salan and Goldberg Macasano as well as a variety of government agencies and associations. Following the economic slowdown of 1981 and the Reagan imposed moratorium on government publications, George Shaffer turned to computers and completed Computer Learning Center's six month programming program, graduating with honors in late 1982. From early 1983 to 1988 he worked for three computer consulting firms on a variety of programming, design and analysis projects of increasing size and complexity. Languages included COBOL, Z80, 80x86 and Wang assemblers and several Basics; he also worked with the Speed II application generator and the Total DBMS. OSs were Wang, CPM and DOS including their scripting languages. For his last consulting project he was the lead developer for all telecommunications subsystems for the 4 million dollar CIMS project at the Department of Commerce; his projects were the only system components completed on or ahead of schedule. In 1988, George Shaffer joined the Association of Trial Lawyers of America as a Senior Programmer Analyst. In one three month period he designed and wrote a 14,000 line dBase Convention registration system. The three months included user training and multiple test setups and dry runs for the on-site registration process, in which four PCs controlled six printer trays through printer sharing boxes, to automatically print six different badge colors based on complex member and registration type criteria. Additional colors could be printed with operator prompts. He personally built and installed ATLA's first Novell server. In late 1991 George Shaffer was promoted to Manager of Information Services at ATLA. One of his first projects as Manager was to work with consultants, select a vendor and assist in negotiating a contract to re-cable the building, in preparation for the move to a full scale Novell LAN. In 1992 he was the sole author, following many interviews and with numerous reviews and sign offs, of a 240 page, Request for Proposal for an integrated association management system; multiple vendors indicated that the RFP was the most comprehensive they had ever received. He was a key participant in the final vendor selection and participated in nearly every contract negotiation session over an eight month period, that in September 1993 resulted in a $920,000 computer system acquisition contract, from the vendor then named Data Management Group. He played a key role in managing the installation of the new system through late 1995, by which time the core modules had been installed. Despite the Manager title, and at times supervising up to eight staff and managing a nearly one million dollar department budget, George Shaffer never stopped performing the technical functions which are his greatest strength. He has done projects in Perl, Basic(s), AIX/ksh shell scripts, COBOL, C, SQL and ColdFusion. In addition to working with AIX, NT 3.51 and 4 (both workstation and server with both versions), Novell, DOS, Windows 3.1, and Wang, George has experience with both OS/2 and Macintosh at both work and home. With the arrival of an RS/6000 for the DMG system, he became familiar with AIX administration and eventually automated every routine management task, so that despite its central role in ATLA operations, the RS/6000 took less staff management time than any other ATLA server. Those few tasks that cannot be automated, disk management, unusual load conditions, and system errors, result in automated e-mails to system administrators advising them of the unusual conditions. In February 1996, George Shaffer was given responsibility for ATLA's web site. Though he had many other small projects and tasks, the web site was by far his largest single project for nearly four years. After 11 years of new environments, tools and challenges at ATLA, George decided it was time to move on. With near perfect timing, in late February 2000, George Shaffer left ATLA on excellent terms and formed GeodSoft, LLC, just as the dot com economy started to dive. ATLA was GeodSoft's first and remained its largest customer. GeodSoft, LLC is now closed. 
Copyright © 2000 - 2014 by George Shaffer. This material may be
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These terms are subject to change. Distribution is subject to
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Distribution in accordance with these terms, for unrestricted and
uncompensated public access, non profit, or internal company use is
allowed.
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