Hi and welcome to my blog! My name is Al Nyveldt. This is my site for all things technical that I work with or am interested in. Have look around and let me know what you think. I’m always interested in feedback.

Well, What can I tell you about me? I'm a software developer located outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA. I play the role of husband and dad to a wonderful wife and 4 great kids. We live on a small farm where we have plenty of things to keep us busy (as if 4 young children weren't enough.) Our personal site has more of this type of information.

I've been working with software since I was a young boy growing up in New England. It started with an Apple IIe at school and those incredible plot graphics in the early 80s. I eventually moved on a Commodore 64 and then to a VAX in high school where I learned to program in Pascal. (Do they still teach that in school?)

Anyway, my interest and enjoyment with programming early in life eventually lead me to Messiah College where I graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 1993. Here I was introduced to the programming world beyond Pascal and to a bunch of software, technologies, and concepts that taught me I had basically just scratched the surface.

After college, I found the working world to be exciting and full of challenges. I worked for a small appraisal company for about 5 years. There I got to do a little bit of everything under the sun. I setup Unix servers and administered them. I worked with GIS, managed projects, and analyzed the data. Mainly however, I did lots of development which included windows programming, digital imaging, and lots of database work.

I left the appraisal company to start my own consulting business. I found clients and continued to help them solve problems through software. I focused on small businesses and windows based solutions. I ended up doing a bit of everything as happens with smaller clients, but it was great fun and I learned a lot. Most of the systems I built during these days are still in use and thriving. It is nice to know that my contributions stood up to the test of time.

While consulting, I became interested in the web and started a web business in 2000. GameSurplus started out as a side hobby and grow into a niche e-commerce success selling strategy board games and card games. (I sold the business in 2003 as it became far too much for my wife and I to handle with our young family.)

In 2001, I decided to leave my consulting business behind and went to work for NHS (a non-profit company helping people with behavioral health services). They were the largest of my clients and had been trying on getting me on staff for some time. I served as Director of IT Development.  I worked with a small team of developers in providing solutions to our unique and diverse non-profit company, spending about 50% of my time developing and the rest is split in team, architect, manager, or director type duties.

In 2007, I joined Andrews and Patel as a Senior Software Engineer working on a small team building a customized Electronic Medical Records system.

I currently spend most of my technical energy working with Microsoft .NET (ASP.NET and C#) and SQL Server. I'm a developer on the BlogEngine.NET project, an open source blogging software. You can read more about my technical work on this site.

(Updated: 12/07/2007)