Get To Know A Member — Bill Barnett

Posted under , , , on October 27th, 2010 by gerard Leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Our first in a series of member profiles.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a late starter and an entrepreneur, an odd mix to be sure. I say "late starter" because I got married, earned my degree, had my first child, and found my calling in life after the age of 35 and most of that after turning 40. I am a former Marine and worked for 17 years mostly as an aircraft mechanic for a large commercial airline. A hockey injury forced me behind a desk for a couple of months as desktop computers began appearing in the workplace in the early 90’s and the rest, as they say, is history. I earned a BS in computer science from the University of Cincinnati in 2002 and was hired that same year by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital where I wrote PHP Web applications. Recently I’ve been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and have co-founded three companies since March 2008. I became an independent software developer in March of 2009 and love life "on the outside."

How did  you come to join Cincy Coworks?

Cincy Coworks is one of the three companies I mentioned co-founding. I met Gerard Sychay, the other co-founder, while working at Children’s Hospital. We were involved in a couple professional development groups after hours and he helped me form the local PHP developers group in 2005. From the outset of our professional careers we shared a sense of the importance of community and we looked around the country at other similar sized cities and saw some of the interesting things that were taking place there and we wanted to do something similar to promote Cincinnati as a hub of innovative thinking. Cincy Coworks is that "something."

What cool project are you working on these days?

BudgetSketch Aside from Cincy Coworks, any free time I have is consumed by my other startups. The first is BudgetSketch, a Web-based personal finance tool that is the antithesis of Mint. Mint is about looking backward at past spending where the users of the application are actually the product that is being consumed by large commercial lenders. BudgetSketch is about looking forward and making a plan for your money which might otherwise be spent impulsively. The second is Gaslight Software which we describe as an agile software development cooperative. Essentially we’re a group of professionals who have worked together, albeit as independents, for many years. Working together we can maximize our skills to the benefit of our clients. At Gaslight, we work with companies large and small, new and old but what we deliver is consistent, quality software.

Posted under , , , on October 27th, 2010 by gerard Leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to Get To Know A Member — Bill Barnett

  1. Paul Henrich says:

    Great profile, Bill. I learned a thing or too reading this, and I’m a fellow member!