Rob Wilkens

Welcome, I’m a person who develops software as a part-time hobby. Some of it I sell from time to time, but it usually only pays for some of my own costs in developing it. My current app is for education use (it’s not an education app, it doesn’t teach anything), and it seems most of the sales are in August-September period each year, and some other sales scattered throughout the year.

Programming Software as a Hobby and Business

Filtrob Message Filter (IOS) (est. 10/19/2024)

This is something I threw together really quick. It’s not a smart spam filter, it only filters KEYWORDS that you BLOCK and ALLOW from the app, then sends the blocked messages to the “messages” app junk mail folder. For me, I needed this because of excessive political spam (likely mostly fake), and I was previously paying another developer somewhere around $5-7/month for this, meanwhile I’m able to do it without a monthly fee. If you can use it, great, but remember, you’re in control of what it blocks and allows (no artificial intelligence).

Student Centered Class Asst. (<- click to visit) (est. 2017)

Mobile/Tablet App (2017-present) designed for teachers to use in classrooms. A teacher in my family requested this app. It’s only on IOS now (android app discontinued) and on IOS (Apple), I have at least 170 customers (as of Late-October 2024). The app uses a seating chart for attendance/homework (handed in or not)/Fire-Drill-Attendance, and randomly picks and groups students. See on App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/student-centered-class-asst/id1278771321

FMail for Windows Store (est. 2012)

From 2012 to 2014, this was a POP3 e-mail client for Windows (from when its mail app lacked pop3 support). This one earned me a few thousand $ on the side. I wrote this is C# with “Windows Metro”.

Contract: Contact Management for Windows (est. 2006)

I worked with Anritsu (2006-2008) to develop a contact management App for Windows (with a PHP/MySQL Back-end to store contacts remotely). This tracked field service technicians for all the major cell phone carriers, displayed in a heirarchy (tree) format (with drag a drop repositioning). This was written in C# on the front end with, again, PHP on server side.

Contract: Tribunal/Dispensation Management System (late 1990s)

1998-2003 Contracted with NAV Co., LLC to codevelop case management software sold to Catholic Diocese Offices. I visited the NYC, Syracuse, and Atlanta Diocese offices to help get the software up and running. This software did things like track annulment cases using Canon Law rules and generated reports to be sent to the Vatican (“Rome Report”). This was written in Borland Delphi, which was also known as Object Pascal.

I earned the CompTIA A+ Certification back around 2001, but it seems to still be valid as of May 2024. The logo is pretty, so I’m adding it here. Many of my other certifications from back then have been retired (Certified Novell Engineer 5, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer [NT4], and Linux Professional Institute Certified Level 1 [expired 2008]). For fun, I might take some new certification exams as time allows.