Pross Co is just me, and as Pross Co I provide fractional CTO services, independent software development services and software team formation services. I have had great success helping companies and non-technical founders build their own development teams. Sometimes I stay on to run it for them more hands on, sometimes I just advise and help them get an operation working and move on. A big part of my work building teams for my clients with Pross Co has been evaluating, mentoring and leading developers of all levels.

Owner, Principal Consultant

As CTO of Ask.Vet, I built a team of 23 developers, testers and designers to build, release and support AskVet&#x27;s mobile and web platform. I started as the sole developer, designed the architecture from scratch and built the platform, hiring and training developers as the company grew.

Co-founder and CEO of FrogSlayer Software (now known as simply Frogslayer) our strategy was to hire student developers in their freshman or sophomore year, teach them how to write real-world code using .NET over the summer and then put them to work competing with off-shore dev shops, and it worked. I was the CEO and later the CTO/COO, but also the lead developer, architect and lead mentor. In addition to boring paid project, we also started FrogSlayer Studios and released a couple X-Box 360 games using C# and XNA! Eventually the business grew beyond the student-outsourcing model, and I moved on.

Founder

In this position I started as a Senior Front-end C++ Developer working on Windows Desktop apps using MFC, Win32 and GDI. And quickly moved into an architect role while we were still using C++ and transitioned the team and product to .NET when it was released. My team and I were the first development team to release a .NET app at Halliburton in 2004 (The Engineer&#x27;s Desktop).

Software Architect

At Iomega - yes, the Zip Drive people - I worked on lots of technology around windows desktop and embedded C development for the research division that are all irrelevant now. Something cool we did was build a portable digital music player using Zip disks. It ran on 6 D-cell batteries which gave it a battery life of about 30 minutes, and you could only get about 10 minutes of audio on a 100Mb zip disk, but, hey, we made a portable music player before the iPod came out!

Software Developer

I first got into Blazor in 2019, released a Blazor WASM hybrid app using custom native-code wrappers in 2020, and have been producing both web and hybrid mobile apps (now using MAUI) for my clients ever since.

Coming from C++ in the 90s, when the first rumors of C# came out in 1999, I was all over it. In the 2000s I mastered C#, WinForms and then WPF and in the 2010s I focused more on using C# with ASP.NET MVC (with JavaScript front-ends) until Blazor came onto the scene and that has been my stack for the 2020s. I eagerly stay current with C# language features and syntax as they have come out and apply them in my work every day - and my how it has grown and how powerful and elegant has it become! If you've got a question about C#, I guarantee I can help.

I've been doing object-oriented design and development for 3 decades now. I attained my first Software Architect job title 20 years ago. What's more is I have mentored 100s of developers on object-oriented concepts and love opening people's minds to this way of thinking. I went to grad school for my MS in CS and my thesis in 2009 was on a topic around service container architecture. If you have a OOP/OOAD problem, I'm your guy. If you just can't quite get an OO concept, principle or pattern to click for you, give me a shot to help you get that "I get it now" moment.

I've been developing servers on asp.net regularly since 2010. For front-end ASP I used classic ASP in VBscript from 1997-2002.  Skipped WebForms (working on WinForms and WPF), but used MVC for a handful of projects in 2010-2012 and then switched up to using Angular for front-end until Blazor came out in 2019.

Personal details

Ross W.

Summary

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Work Experience

Education