Bradley Ward Software Development
Custom software · Lake Wylie, South Carolina
I get data from wherever it exists or is created, and put it wherever it needs to be — in the format that makes it valuable.
That one sentence covers most of my career. It was the essence of the SCADA, MES, ERP, and EAM integration work I did for decades, and it is still the essence of what I build today with ESP32 devices and home-automation systems.
Only the plumbing has changed. Early on it meant writing interfaces to low-level manufacturing equipment over RS-232 serial ports. That gave way to custom message-based interfaces, then to SOAP and REST, and then to the modern API, MQTT, and SignalR world we work in now. The problem underneath has never moved: some system holds data that another system needs, and something has to bridge them reliably and keep doing it without supervision.
I am semi-retired, and I take on small, targeted, short-duration projects. The work I am looking for is exactly the work described above: designing, writing, and delivering a custom system that collects, extracts, or assembles data from any source and lands it in whatever destination makes it useful — a SQL database, an API endpoint, an Excel workbook, a dashboard, a device.
I work both remotely and locally. When a project is destined for a plant, facility, or site, I am available to travel to do the installation and startup myself — I have done that throughout my career, and I think it matters: the person who wrote the software is the right person to see it running in the place it has to live.
If you have a data problem that fits that shape, I would be glad to hear about it. Email is the best way to reach me: brad@wardsrus.net.
I hold BS and MS degrees in civil engineering from Mississippi State University, and I have spent my career as a software architect and engineer — an engineer who writes software, which shaped how I approach both.
My work has centered on industrial automation and enterprise integration: SCADA and MES systems, PLC and plant-floor equipment interfaces, OPC-UA, ERP and EAM connectivity, service-oriented architecture, and legacy system modernization. That included pharmaceutical manufacturing under FDA regulation, with GxP and 21 CFR Part 11 validation, and a role I seemed to keep getting handed: taking over troubled, behind-schedule projects and getting them delivered.
Over the years that work has included systems for organizations such as Amtrak, GlaxoSmithKline, British Airways, and General Foods. Earlier in my career I founded and ran a software development firm that grew to a dozen developers, building industrial systems — some of which ran in 24x7 production environments for nearly thirty years, including systems for McKee Foods Corporation, the maker of Little Debbie snack cakes.
Retirement has not slowed the building down; it has narrowed it to the parts I enjoy most. Current work is in .NET 10 and C# on the server side and C++ with ESP-IDF on the ESP32 platform for embedded and sensor work, tied together with MQTT. I have also designed custom printed circuit boards and had them fabricated overseas — taking a board from schematic to a finished device in hand.
Over the past year I have put more than a thousand hours of software development time into working with Anthropic's Claude, architecting and building real systems in both of those stacks. It has genuinely changed how much one person can design, build, and maintain alone, and it is a large part of why taking on small custom projects in retirement is practical at all.
That carries directly into how I would work with you. Any project I take on will be developed using Claude — or whatever AI tool you prefer, if you have a standard of your own.
Every project I deliver includes AI-ready skills and documentation as a first-class deliverable: a deliberate capture of the domain expertise and hard-won knowledge built up over the course of the work, written so an AI assistant can carry it forward.
The point is what happens after I am gone. A semi-technical support person or a junior developer, working with that material, should be able to pick the system up, understand why it does what it does, and change it safely — without needing me and without reverse-engineering the code from scratch.
Bradley Ward Software Development operates a small, private, opt-in SMS program used for two-factor authentication codes and home-automation alerts. It is transactional only — never marketing — and recipients opt in themselves by text message. The program's documentation is published here:
Email: brad@wardsrus.net
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bradleywardsoftware
Facebook: facebook.com/DiverBW
This domain has also been the Ward family's corner of the Internet for more than twenty years — say hello to the family.