I'm a principal software engineer, founder and entrepreneur who has worked in several successful technology startups to ship products on-time, on-budget and that scale to millions of users and billions of requests daily! I am a technologist at heart that can take the complexities of technology and help you simplify it.
I can guide you through decisions about managing technical debt, scaling, product development, software quality, building successful engineering teams both local and remote and using the right technology to solve your problems.
Dan's ability to dive in, understand, and begin to automate the testing of our products --during his very first week on the job-- was impressive. He has a deep technical understanding of current technologies (so good that our Development team borrowed him to tune our MySQL DBs) and has a no-nonsense, enthusiastic, and professional personality that is well suited for QA.
Dan implemented the performance testing on my software deliverables near the end of a 12 month project. His efficency and confidence in delivering the testing was a testament to his level of skill. When my software was found to be under-performing, Dan took the initiative to research the problem and rapidly learnt that it was the performance testing instrumentation which was at fault rather than the software itself. I sincerely hope to have the pleasure of working with Dan again.
For a long time our QA group was badly mismanaged and our test processes were in constant disarray. Despite this hostile environment, Dan consistently came through with reliable, in-depth test plans and numerous detailed, readable, and reproducible bug reports. Among the development team, we often heard comments like, "Thank goodness at least Dan knows what he's doing." I specifically sought out Dan to work with me on the ExchangeIt and DB2 projects, where his prompt and thorough testing were instrumental to our ability to deliver a quality product on time.
Having worked several years with Dan on varying projects I can say Dan is a very skilled person who innovates to improve quality. I have total trust in Dan to always do a very methodical job and deliver top quality results, no matter how demanding and diverse the work may be. I highly recommend Dan.
Daniel was the senior QA engineer assigned to the backup group at Net Integration (now IBM), when I was working on a next generation system designed to enable off-site encrypted back ups along with another programmer (Mark Cote).
Dan's bug reports were always exceedingly good (describing exactly how to reproduce the reported problem) and his test plans were meticulous. He also pointed out some serious usability problems with the software during the QA process and convinced management that they needed to be addressed (which was much appreciated).
Bottom line? Dan would be a huge asset to almost any development team.