My name is David Christiansen. I'm the founder, owner, and developer of TroopTrack. I've been working on TroopTrack since June 2008, but the initial idea goes all the way back to my pre-teen years as a scout. You see, I was always losing my handbook. This tendency made keeping track of advancement difficult.
About the same time I was forever losing my scout handbook, I started to write software, creating my first program to be used commercially when I was only thirteen. I used the money I earned writing software to learn to scuba dive. I haven't stopped coding since and have worked on software from many industries, including aerospace design and manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services, government, and public health.
Meanwhile, my wife Shannon and I have both been involved in the youth organizations of our church for many years. I served as a troop committee chair, Varsity Coach, and young men's instructor, while Shannon worked as a counselor in the various development programs for girls and young women. Shannon recently became a Webelos den leader in our son Eli's pack and she is driving lots of pack-related improvements.
These experiences impressed on both of us how difficult it can be to run a youth organization, while my professional experiences helped me to start imagining ways the ever-expanding power of software and the web could impact scouting. We felt that technology, leveraged well, could make it easier to spend less time staying organized and more time cultivating the positive qualities we were trying to instill in the young people we served.
I thought about TroopTrack for years before I started working on it. I hope that is starting to show in the product features I've developed so far - TroopTrack is finally beginning to resemble the application I imagined creating when I started this little venture. It is my intention to have this trend continue, perpetually adding newer and better features to TroopTrack to make and keep it the premier solution for managing youth organizations.
TroopTrack LLC is a debt-free cash enterprise. It is designed to run and grow on less than it makes, even in the early stages. This makes it easy to sustain as a personal venture without the burden of outside investment. I like running the company this way, and I think it embodies many of the qualities we try to teach scouts everywhere: resourcefulness, ingenuity, thriftiness, and courage.
At TroopTrack, I use an innovative approach to creating software, based on the books Lean Software Development and User Stories Applied. This approach allows me to focus on the needs of my users and bring your desires to life rapidly and with as little waste as possible.
This approach makes the user experience a little different from other software products you may have used. Here are some examples of the differences you might encounter as a user:
The project management tool I use to guide my work on TroopTrack is publicly viewable. Anytime you like, you can see what I'm currently working on, what I'm planning to work on next, and even what bugs are in the system that I know about. You can even see a best-guess estimate of when the stuff I'm working on will be done.
Here's some of the technology I use to make TroopTrack happen:
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