Coding

Scott has been programming since 1983 when he started with Basic. Since then he’s coded commercially successful products in Rexx, Lotus Notes/Domino, Perl, C, C++, etc…

AM

In September 2008, with his son, Chris, and daughter, Ashley, Scott founded FFX Corporation to bring a novelty product to market. That business ran into some technical snags, so product design was halted. Chris picked up Archery in January 2009, and by April, Scott had started work on a new iPhone application. Fortunately, in November of 2009, the application was launched as Archer’s Mark (AM). For those not familiar with the landscape at this time, the iPhone had been out for less than two years, and the iTunes App Store had some very rough edges. Getting your iPhone App in the Apple App Store at that time was no easy feat. After 17 years, Archer’s Mark has sold thousands of copies at $19.99 each and has consistently maintained an average rating of 4.3 stars from customers on iTunes.

In January 2010, Lancaster Archery Supply agreed to sponsor AM and help us promote it at their annual Lancaster Archery Classic. Then, in October 2010, FFX released Archer’s Score as both a stand-alone iPhone app for $9.99 and as an in-app purchase for existing Archer’s Mark customers at $7.99. Archer’s Score has also sold thousands of copies and has a solid four-star rating. Finally, in April 2011, FFX launched its third application, Archer’s Excuses(AE). This was a simple 99-cent application (now free) meant to inject some humor into archery. We’ve traditionally used it for promotional purposes.

Over the summer of 2010, Scott debuted Archer’s Mark on the web, a mobile website project developed entirely by Scott. It was written in PHP, with the most significant portion being the porting of the C-Language ballistics Marks Library he wrote for Archer’s Mark. This version allowed folks without an Apple iOS platform device to compute accurate sight marks. For marketing reasons, this version was taken offline in the spring of 2011 but returned for a brief time during the summer of 2015 as FFX sought to sell its family of archery products. It has since been removed.

TKDBooks

FFX also explored Apple’s enhanced book platform, bringing several products to market for the Taekwondo community. The first two: the Colored Belt Student Manual & the Black Belt Student Manual were released in the spring of 2012 as enhanced books for the Apple iTunes platform. Later in 2014, Scott used FFX to publish his mom’s first children’s book.

In the spring of 2013, Scott bought a $60 Raspberry Pi single-board 1W computer. He’s since set it up for Internet Security penetration testing, and as a home web server hosting this site. Now it hosts three websites behind a world-class Content Delivery Network (CDN) provided by CloudFlare. Here are Scott’s instructions for setting this up.

Scott has been writing code since he purchased his TRS-80 in January 1983. First, it was Basic, then Assembly. He took IBM System 360/370 Assembly at Westchester Community College in the spring of 1983. Then, in the fall of that year, he took Fortran at Rochester Institute of Technology. With his co-op at IBM Research in the spring of 1984, he began working with Rexx on both VM-mainframe and the PC as part of PC/VM Bond (God, he loved Rexx). At IBM Research, he taught himself Pascal & C. Note that this was all in the 1980s; since then, it’s been an alphabet soup of languages, with PHP being the latest. Now that he’s focused on cybersecurity capture-the-flag competitions, it’s Python.