About me

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 a look around and let me know what you think.

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 children weren't enough.)

I've been developing things since I was a young boy in school starting with an Apple IIe at school. I later went to Messiah College where I graduated with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.

After college, I worked for an appraisal company for 5 years and while I learned a ton of things and was stretched in many ways, I ended up leaving to start my own consulting company. I focused on smaller businesses for the most part and ended up doing all kinds of interesting projects.

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.)

Eventually, I decided to leave my consulting business behind and went to work for one of my clients with one of those "offers you can't refuse". 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 company, spending about 50% of my time developing and the rest split in team, architect, manager/director type duties.

After about 6 years, I needed a break from the travel and wanted to focus more on development so I took a full time position working on a small team building a customized Electronic Medical Records system. This was a great experience and reinforced in my mind that I really wanted to focus my efforts on software development.

As main development on the medical system finished up, I started to do work for additional clients like I had years earlier. Today, I'm once again running my own small consulting firm. I try to split my time between client work and my own products.

(Updated: 02/14/2015)