Engineering experience
Investment teams waiting for financial analysis. Healthcare operations managing demanding production workloads. Retail stores replacing registers while customers continue shopping. Fundraising teams changing software without losing the reporting their work depends on.
These are the kinds of environments in which I have developed software, engineered databases, and taken responsibility for difficult production problems. My work connects the business process, the application, and the data underneath it—from finding the cause of a slow report to designing the scripts technicians use during a live system cutover.
Today, I bring that experience to Netherwood Data Partners, combining senior database engineering with modern software development, AI-assisted implementation, source control, and practical testing.
The career stories below describe Steven Wittek’s work during prior employment and consulting engagements. Organizations are anonymized. Current independent software projects are identified separately.
Investment reporting runtime
Measured career outcome; approximate timingsProduction platform and reporting experience
Technical operating scaleControlled healthcare maintenance work
Technical operating scaleCutover scripts and transaction synchronization
Rollout scale; database cutover engineering contributionCareer work
01 · Financial technology
A two-hour reporting process reduced to under three minutes, alongside separate work on cloud modernization, scalability, security governance, recovery, and controlled releases.
Read the story02 · Healthcare technology
Production performance leadership and a controlled maintenance process for a demanding healthcare platform, including 150GB+ indexes.
Read the story03 · Nonprofit finance and CRM
Executive reporting, reusable donor selections, and transaction reconciliation supporting multimillion-dollar fundraising operations and business-software change.
Read the story04 · Retail systems
Database cutover engineering for a multiweek POS and inventory rollout, progressing at one or two stores per day while sales continued.
Read the story05 · Research and higher education
Reverse engineering and migration preparation for intellectual property records, inventor relationships, licensing information, and financial allocations.
Read the story06 · Critical incident diagnosis
Application and database concurrency analysis resolved the blocking and deadlocks preventing a recovered business system from operating reliably.
Read the story07 · Healthcare reporting modernization
Database and reporting compatibility work for one healthcare client’s participating application, preserving its practical function through a platform change.
Read the storyCurrent independent development
My independent development work brings these operating lessons into the way I build today. I define the problem, investigate the existing system, and use AI-assisted tools to explore approaches, develop implementations, and improve tests and documentation. The business requirement and the evidence remain the basis for deciding whether the work is complete.
My role includes specifying behavior, directing implementation, reviewing changes, and validating the result. A generated implementation still needs to be understood in the context of the application, its data, and its failure conditions. For database work, I examine plans, execution behavior, and data relationships. For software, I test the user flow and check how the components work together.
Git, pull requests, automated checks, and release workflows make changes easier to inspect and reproduce. SQL database projects and deployment artifacts provide a reviewable record of database changes. I use that structure to keep implementation, validation, and delivery connected, with documentation that explains decisions and remaining limits.
This approach helps me move efficiently between database engineering, application development, integrations, and practical automation. The objective is a working result that can be reviewed, maintained, and handed over with an understandable account of what was changed and checked.
Built around a problem I encountered in performance engineering: a database refresh or Query Store retention limit can remove the baseline before an optimization effort is finished. QueryVault preserves completed Query Store periods in a separate SQL Server archive for later comparison. Its public source, real lab screenshots, and validation documentation make the design and evidence inspectable.
Explore QueryVault Public project evidenceA visual SQL Server index and heap inspection tool that makes physical database structures easier to explore. The developer preview separates analysis from explicitly enabled maintenance and exposes proposed SQL for review. Its public overview describes the design and current limitations; the implementation remains private.
Explore PageMover Public project evidenceAn independent application and systems-integration project connecting Garmin workout readings with phone displays and an optional assistant connection. It demonstrates my current approach to defining product behavior, directing AI-assisted development, testing integrations, and managing software changes. Its product pages provide the current setup and availability information.
Explore Motion RelayWork with Netherwood
If an application is slow, a migration is approaching, or a business process needs better software, describe the system and the result you need. Netherwood offers direct involvement from the engineer doing the work, with scope and validation agreed for the project.
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