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Andrew Wicklander's Professional Profile

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Hi, I'm Andrew

Thanks for stopping by to learn a little more about me. I live in Chicago, Illinois in a great neighborhood called Logan Square with my awesome wife and two great kids.  I've started two companies, Ideal Project Group and Duarlander, created a mobile software app called GoFind!, designed and developed a free web application at ThirtyDayProject.org, created a little add on to 37signals' Campfire called Notifire, and also work on a variey of projects for my clients.  I write on my blog Project Idealism, where you can read my unfiltered opinions about project managment, technology, entrepeneurship, business and other things that interest me. I also interview people about the cool projects that they're working on for the podcast I publish under the same name as my blog. If after looking at my profile you'd still like a traditional resume, you can download a copy of it where I've listed specific client work and projects in a bit more detail, at the bottom of this page.

Ideal Project Group

My first company - a small project management business focused on delivering results for my customers



In December of 2006 I started Ideal Project Group. At the time, I had been managing IT projects for about three years and was ready to go out on my own. Since then I've managed a variety of projects. For my clients, I've worked on technology projects in the financial, marketing, telecommunications, and non-profit industries. For my own company I built an Android application, manage a podcast, contribute to my blog, and a whole bunch of other stuff related to running the business. Here's a list of some of the types of projects I've managed:


  • The development of numerous data driven web applications for both small businesses and large enterprises.
  • The development of various Interactive Voice Response applications
  • The creation or expansion of very large network infrastructures throughout the United States and Europe
  • Business Intelligence projects involving extensive data modeling and ETL script writing
  • Mobile application development for the Android Operating system
  • Numerous e-commerce solutions for small businesses
  • Creating a lot of small websites as favors for friends and family



I have a PMP certification and have also managed both software development and network infrastructure projects in Agile environments. There's a lot of debate in the world of project management about which method is better, but I've used both to successfully complete projects.

Like most things, they both have their strengths and their weaknesses and I try to take the best from each and leave the worst. I think anyone that completely dismisses the other out of hand is making a mistake. I also believe someone that is completely married to any process is preventing themselves from learning when new, more effective things come along.

My general belief about project management can be summed up in the following way: If it helps you get things done it's good. If it makes getting things done more difficult it's bad.

GoFind!

My first product - an application running on Android designed to make it easier for people to meet up with their freinds.

One of the things I love about technology is the way it can bring people together. The problem I have with it though is that it's sometimes used as a substitute for physical, in person, human interaction. Put it this way; I love finding an old friend on facebook, but I hate it when I see less of my current friends because we're supposedly "connected" all the time. I'm convinced that the next generation of social networking apps are going to be geo-based applications that help bring people together - physically.

GoFind! is one small step in this direction.

It's an application designed to bring people together in large, open, crowded, outdoor areas like a music festival. Have you ever tried finding someone in the parking lot before or after a concert? Or tried to find them in the middle of a huge crowd in a large park? It's a big frustrating mess and that's the problem we solved with GoFind!.

Here's how it works:

  • One person sends a request basically saying "hey, I want to find you.".
  • When the other person accepts they toss their geo-coordinates to their friend.
  • The person who initiated the request gets an arrow on their screen pointing them to exactly where their friend is located while also displaying how far apart they are.
  • The person that accepted the request also sees how far apart they are, along with an icon indicating the direction their friend is coming from.

It's pretty simple to the user, but there's actually quite a bit going on inside the application. I think it's pretty awesome, but then again, I'm not really impartial.

Notifire

Notifire is a little add-on to Campfire, a really great web-based chat software by 37signals, that makes it easy to add live chat support to any website.

It's a simple Ruby on Rails web-app that constantly monitors a Campfire chat room and sends Instant Messages and/or text message alerts to people when someone enters a chat room. It's a really easy way to add live chat support to any website. Very simple to the user, but fairly complex behind the scenes, this application connects with two different API's - the Campfire API to monitor the room, and the tropo API to deliver the SMS and IM applications. You can learn more about Notifire and what it does by checking it out at notifire.me.

Project Idealism

My blog about Project Management, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Business and other things that may or may not be related.

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Podcast

In addition to blogging regularly, I also have a monthly (about) podcast where I interview people that are doing great things. You can check it out in iTunes if you'd like to have a listen, or simply click on the links below.
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Duarlander

My second company - a small business that tests Android applications for developers



Duarlander was founded in October of 2009 when we were testing GoFind!. During our tests, we found there were certain bugs that would present themselves on some devices that wouldn't appear on others. In fact, we still come across some unique bugs we've never seen previously as new devices come out.

As I thought about the challenge associated with knowing whether our application would work on all the new devices, I figured I wasn't alone. Surely other developers would be running into this issue. So I started Duarlander. It's a company that tests applications for Android developers on all the phones that have been released in the US that are running the Android OS.

When we first started out, we began testing everything ourselves. We pretty quickly realized that model wasn't going to work and launched a community based testing site. The idea is that anyone with an Android phone can make a little money, and developers will have a place where there's ready access to all the various devices by way of the community of users. You can read the all the details on this blog post if you're interested in learning more.

ThirtyDayProject.org

ThirtyDayProject.org is the first web application that I designed and developed. It was sort of a challenge to myself and I had to learn enough Ruby on Rails and CSS to make it happen. The story is really best told by visiting the site so if you're interested in it you should check out the site. The short story is that a guy I never met decided he was going to give away a bunch of ideas, I said I'd make one of them real, and ThirtyDayProject.org is the result.

Resume

If after taking a look at all this you'd still like a copy of a resume, you can download it here.

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andrewatideal

Husband, Father, Friend, Entrepreneur.

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