Hi, I'm John Langley

As the tech lead and CTO at CRLT, I thoroughly enjoyed putting together and working with top-tier new talent from Purdue University. What an incredible opportunity it was to not only labor alongside these humans, but to also pour into them wherever they needed. As a team, we made a very complex, very compelling 3D training simulation tool that pushed the boundaries of the tech, as we built the world's first top-down incident command training tool, geared at replacing costly & infrequent in-person scenarios. Our dream and vision was saving lives by giving valuable, repeatable, low-cost training to replace traditionally expensive in-person tabletop exercises for law enforcement and security personnel.

My primary role, other than wearing the many hats required as a lead position in a startup (don't worry, I love hats), was to architect and push all of the systems we needed to develop. With an initially  inexperienced team, that meant a lot of leading the initial conversations and helping develop the critical thinking skills necessary to arrive at the right solution. Some of my favorite moments here were working on some huge system solo (it was therapy for my introverted soul!), and then reaching a collaborative or hand-off state where the team could take all of the nerdy stuff I did and make it very much shined and polished in user experience.

Owning a small business has proved challenging but rewarding. While it would be our future hope that CRLT’s product would continue to be a training tool that benefits the community, due to economic conditions, we are at a place where we have determined we need to both seek stable, long term employment.

During a lull for CRLT, a local high-tech, farmer friend, pilot, and business owner brought me on as a part-time Consultant/Contract Programmer for his two companies. One focuses on creating factory and after-market engine control modules for a motorcycle manufacturer. The other focuses on accurately counting eggs on a belt-conveyor system.

My unique background of programming, networking, and system-level-experience allowed us to resurrect a "rolls test system" - at the end of an assembly line process. This test platform dynamically tests bikes of different wheelbases. It was out of commission for over a decade until Tim (IDS owner) & I fixed it in 2023. I focused on recreating a completely corrupted and almost dead hard drive. This involved rebuilding the OS, Network, Database (it was stored locally), and the diagnostic program itself. This provided HUGE value to the manufacturer.

Another project I did was to proof-of-concept a camera-based image recognition system to audit & augment the IR-based egg counters. This system is able to differentiate various shapes of eggs, detect damaged portions of the conveyor, and identify foreign objects. This runs in a low-latency, low-power environment, and makes use of good, old-fashioned math over fancy machine learning-based systems which couldn't handle the environment.

I worked for Sharetec for a very long time. This hopefully shows that I like sticking with a group of people through both the good times and the bad. My only reason for exiting Sharetec, was to take the leap of faith with my cousin to start CRLT. While credit union core system programming is probably not everyone's definition of excitement, we always had a new set of interesting and unique challenges to solve which really stretched me as an individual, and I will be forever grateful for my experience with them.

While here, I worked with a team of professionals building customer experiences for all aspects of a credit union processing system, including credit union employees and member facing experiences. I got my start here by writing a web-based loan application system and integrating it with some extreme legacy technology. I continued my journey by extending the legacy system's capabilities to provide gateway functionality to various hardware devices and online software service providers.

Eventually, we built a new front-end system in Angular, and upgraded the backend to ASP.NET Core. On the way, I wrote, from the ground-up, a new online banking platform and new mobile banking products as well, which was a major source of revenue for the company. Beyond the headaches of all of the regulations and compliance that go with programming anything in the financial industry, there were some very fun problems to solve, and the space was always evolving.

My work here ended up getting me a job offer at the parent company (Sharetec). While I primarily did data conversions, when I heard of what a customer wanted, I always told the account and product managers how we could make a certain thing happen that they presumed wasn't possible or wasn't easy because no one had done it before. We were able to offer our credit union customers more products and possibilities, which ultimately was mutually beneficial to our company, to our direct customer, and then to the community of members that they ultimately served.

Degree in Computer Networks & Computer Science - formalizing what I already knew.