About Us

Colin and Lisa are enterprise data integration professionals. We collectively have over 50 years’ experience working and consulting to customers requiring application development and data integration expertise, using Visual FoxPro, .NET, Java, and XML/XSLT.

Lisa is (so far) failing miserably to achieve retirement status, but still hoping. She currently freelances as a Principal Solutions Architect.

Colin works for DesignMind as Managing Principal • App Dev/Database.

Previously, we consulted as Spacefold, providing services as an independent company based in the Las Vegas area. We also served jointly as CTO for Poseidon Saltwater Systems, Inc.

Technologies:

  • SQL Server
  • Oracle
  • MySQL/MariaDB
  • SQL Server Reporting Services, Integration Services, and Analysis Services
  • XML and XSLT
  • Data schema design and business analysis
  • Technical documentation authoring
  • Web application development (intranet and extranet, JSP or ASP.NET, microservices)
  • .NET smart client development
  • Visual FoxPro  application development
  • FileMaker Pro

Details for each of us:

Lisa Nicholls

email

résumé

Lisa Nicholls

Lisa Slater Nicholls was most recently Solutions Architect for Dominican University of California.  At Dominican, she has also been Director of Institutional Research and a DBA.  Now, having attempted to retire, she is working in the role of Principal Solutions Architect for various clients.   Her work spans BI and front-end app development.

During her tenure at Dominican, she and Colin Nicholls also served jointly as CTO’s for Poseidon Saltwater Systems, Inc, an oil-and-gas industry startup in Texas.

She served in the role of Principal Software Architect at Infor for Enwisen HR Service Delivery, for three years. She served as a DBA for the Santa Rosa City Schools District (SRCS) from August 2010 through September 2012. Previous to working at SRCS, she was the Microsoft Technologies Team Account Manager and Solutions Architect at EC|Wise, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lisa has been developing and communicating innovative solutions for data storage, collection, reporting, and analysis for over thirty years. With twenty-five years’ experience developing with on-line technologies, she enjoys absorbing and connecting diverse technical environments and requirements.

Before beginning work at EC|Wise in 2007, she and  Colin Nicholls formed Spacefold,  as an independent software company in Las Vegas, Nevada. Previously, she served as an integration engineer for Acxiom Corporation for four years, designing integration solutions for Oracle, Siebel, IBM, and other Alliance partners.

She has served in project management, design, and Xbase development roles at Microsoft for Visual FoxPro 9.0’s Report System features. She has designed java-based and .NET-based intranet and internet sites as Business Intelligence solutions, for business-centered results. She has a special passion for XML/XSLT-based data integration and reporting.

Lisa has taught numerous RAD seminars and has been a featured speaker at major FoxPro and database conferences throughout the world. She was lead writer for the bestselling Using FoxPro 2.x volumes (Que) and FoxPro MAChete (Hayden), the author of the “Report Writer” volume of Pros Talk Fox Series One, and Series Editor for Pros Talk Fox Series Two (Pinnacle). Her most recent book is Flying Fox: Applying Visual FoxPro Reporting to Any Data, in Any Environment.

Colin Nicholls

email

résumé

Colin Nicholls

Colin started his professional career in 1988 working at Telecom New Zealand, developing in-house corporate database applications and acquiring business analysis skills.

In 1993, Colin joined Cornerstone Software, a consulting company specializing in database applications. Their clients included Telecom NZ, and BP New Zealand. In 1996 Colin accepted the position of Development Manager at Cornerstone.

After moving to the U.S. in 1999, Colin joined Acxiom Corporation as an integration engineer in the Strategic Alliance Partners division, where Acxiom technology had to be integrated into various application architectures.

In 2003, he and his partner Lisa formed Spacefold, based in Nevada, consulting as independent software analyst/programmers and data integration specialists, working at Bally Technologies on internal database systems and integrated reporting web applications. He has contracted for the Microsoft Visual FoxPro team reporting features, written technical articles for a number of international FoxPro journals, and has been a speaker at many FoxPro developer conferences.

From 2007-2017 Colin worked as an Oracle Developer and Business Analyst at  EC|Wise, a technology company with deep strengths in business analytics and the many related, data-relevant, areas of great interest to us both.

He served as co-CTO for Poseidon Saltwater Systems, Inc between August 2017 and August 2020.

In late 2021, Colin joined the DesignMind team, serving as Principal Data Architect.  He is now Managing Principal • App Dev/Database there.