Nick began programming in BASIC while in high school, using TRS-80 and Atari 800 computers in the school's computer lab. In the Navy, he continued programming as a hobby. In graduate school, many of his courses included programming elements, primarily using specialized languages on IBM mainframes; in parallel with that experience, he began working as a programmer for hire, starting out writing custom office software on the original Apple Macintosh computer.
Working as a management science consultant at General Foods USA (later absorbed into Kraft Foods), Nick began focusing more of his time and passion on software design and development. Using tools such as Turbo Pascal and VP-Expert on MS-DOS, along with mainframe-based languages such as FORTRAN and MPSX, he developed forecasting, simulation, scheduling, and product quality diagnostic tools for internal clients.
Over the next few years, working in subsidiaries of Philip Morris and Joseph E. Seagream & Sons, Nick's work focus shifted, from a primary emphasis on decision sciences, supported by custom computational tools, to an emphasis on providing custom software and other information services, but still with an analytical flavor. To develop and deploy logistics, data interchange, and infrastructure management tools and services, he expanded his development tool set to include Delphi, C/C++, DBase, FileMaker, HyperCard/HyperTalk, 4th Dimension, STELLA, and ExtendSim.
The increased focus on software development continued from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, while Nick was working for Business Design Associates (since acquired by Vision Consulting). There, his development work was primarily in the service of business process redesign and automation for BDA's US and international clients, using SQL Server, IIS & ASP, ActionWorks Metro, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Access, Visual Basic, and HTML with CSS and JavaScript. At the same time, his work was expanding beyond software design and development, to include software and network architecture, as well as planning and leading workshops to train teams of developers for BDA and its clients.
Becoming an independent contractor in 2001, Nick built on his experience, expanding his set of programming languages to include Java, Python, VB.NET, C#, NetLogo, and PHP; his application server skills to include ASP.NET and Java Enterprise; and his database experience to include Oracle, HSQLDB, and MySQL. During this period, he began offering full-stack development services to his clients, focusing on systems integration in connected and semi-connected environments, and on content management and delivery for educational/training content.
Another shift in focus came in the 2010s, as Nick spent 5 years as a senior build & tools engineer at Numerix LLC, where he applied Ant, Maven, MSBuild, XSLT, WiX Toolset, Python, Java, and TeamCity to improve existing (and automate new) build, test, and deployment processes.
As Chief Technology Officer for Friday Networking Lunch and Occulant, Nick led development teams in defining, building, and deploying a heuristic optimization system for resource and event scheduling, along with a set of web services for managing the scheduling process and the associated data stores.