David Studebaker

David Studebaker is currently a Principal of Liberty Grove Software, Inc., with his partner Karen Studebaker. Liberty Grove Software provides development, consulting, training, and upgrade services for Microsoft Dynamics NAV resellers and firms using NAV internally. Liberty Grove Software is a Microsoft Certified Partner. David has been recognized by Microsoft three times as a Certified Professional for NAV: in Development, in Applications, and in Installation & Configuration. He is also a Certified Microsoft Trainer for NAV. He began developing in C/AL in 1996. David Studebaker has been programming since taking his first Fortran II course in 1962. In the fall of 1963 he took the first COBOL course taught at Purdue University, where the first U.S. computer science department was later created. The next spring, undergraduate student David was assigned to teach the graduate level class. Since that time, David has been an active participant in each step of computing technology: from the early mainframes to today's technology, from binary assembly coding to C/AL. He has worked with over 40 different models and brands of computers, over a dozen operating systems and over two dozen different programming languages. Special projects include the development of the first production SPOOL system in 1967. In the decades following, David was project manager and lead developer for several commercially distributed business application systems. Application areas in which David has worked range from engineering to manufacturing to freight carriage to general accounting to public mass transit to banking to not-for-profit and association management to legal billing to distribution/inventory management to shop floor data collection and production management. David has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from the University of Chicago, both with concentrations in computer science. David has been a computer operator, systems programmer, applications programmer, business analyst, consultant, service bureau operations manager, bureaucrat, teacher, project manager, trainer, documenter, software designer, mentor, writer, and entrepreneur. He has been partner or owner and manager of several computer systems businesses, while always maintaining a significant role as a business applications developer. David's work with relational databases and 4th generation languages with integrated development environments began in 1984. David assisted in script writing for a series of audio training courses for early PC operating systems and wrote for a newsletter Computers in Education. A series of articles by David for several trade and professional magazines were published concerning the use of computer systems to track and help manage manufacturing shop-floor operations. He was lead author of the Product Identification and Tracking section of the SME Tool and Manufacturing Handbook. For over ten years, David was a reviewer of business applications-related publications for Computing Reviews of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). David has been a member of the ACM since 1963 and was a founding officer of two local chapters of the ACM.