Message from Founding Partner
Darin Swan

Message from Founding Partner

Darin Swan

I have been programming and working on systems most of my working life, which gives me roughly 20 yrs of experience.

I contracted most of the time I was in school on various projects. After finishing my Bachelors degree in Computer Science (1990), I started working full time at UC Riverside and spent 8 years in the Environmental Health & Safety Department working on various database projects, while I continued to work on my Masters in Computer Science (1995).

Over the years I have worked on more database systems than I can recall, probably somewhere around 200-300.

Some of my major contracts have included: Public works of LA, World Wide Web Casinos, Riverside County, Imperial Bank, Pacific Group, VMPI, Direct Mortgage, Escrow Works, sciencefiction.com, MetroLink, etc. Many of them are still clients.

Since 2000, I been refining my networking skills and have received my CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) and I'm continuing with my CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional 2-3 year certification) courses.

As a programmer, it becomes your business to learn everyone else's business. In many ways, you come to understand a client's business process better than they do, because at a programming level you have to be able to lay out and program every little step that must be done to create a stable and efficient system.

Over the years I've worked with many different types of businesses and business models. I come away from each new project with a greater understanding of the underlying fundamentals of business information processing.

As an example, the business model for a particular type of financial institution will vary slightly from institution to institution, but overall every one of them must follow basic accounting rules and a common set of information collection and processing requirements.

At the most fundamental level, a basis for all businesses is the need for databases to track and process information in a structured business model.

At an even more fundamental level, computer systems and languages have become “transparent” to me. When it gets right down to it, there are only so many tasks you can do with a computer. Every language must necessarily perform those tasks in one way or another. The function names and the way the code must be written is different for each language but the functionality is always the same.

With each new language, system and development tool I learn, this becomes even more obvious to me and my ability to come up to speed on new languages increases. I consider it essential to keep up on new technologies in today’s programming environment. This is especially true for Internet programming where continual and very rapid change is the norm.

The constant advance of computer technology has revolutionized the way we all do business. Powerful information and communications technologies that were once only affordable to the largest businesses have now become affordable to even the smallest businesses with limited budgets and information systems skills.

Today, computer technology is much more affordable, even so, to get the most from your technology investment dollar requires a real analysis of your business technology needs and solutions that will serve you immediately and long into the future. Failure to properly plan for business technology needs generally costs more than the technology itself and can even result in the failure of the business itself. For example, failure to properly scale database systems to meet your business needs can result in corruption of your databases and loss of business time and money.

Our goal is to help your business profit from more effective use of your technology, by putting our business experience and skills to work for you, thus saving you countless hours of experimentation, being misled by vendors, and increasing your overall profits and peace of mind. This allows you and your management people to do what they do best — which is work on core business objectives — rather than being buried in technological problems and day to day operations.

Darin Swan
Senior Programmer Analyst