Mission:

1. Invent, build and share simple software solutions.  

2. Improve founder's retention and employability through continuous learning and improving off-hours. 

Company Information:

WinTestGear is based in Shoreline, Washington (U.S.A.). 

WTG is a passionate hobby of mine, not a revenue generating business. 

Click here for founder Matt Pierce's background on LinkedIn.  

History:

1999
Started P.B. Systems as a hobby in early 1999 creating freeware.  Titles included TaskZipa> (backup utility), Buggit (bug tracker), MDBDiff ( (MS Access diff tool), TCM (Test Case Manager) and several other tools.

2000 - 2002
By mid-2000, hobby time disappeared and new product development along with it (started a family, etc.).  Maintenance continued on most applications until early-2002. By late-2002, work stopped on
http://www.pb-sys.com.  Intended to eventually revive the side-business in the future.

2003 - 2009
Nearly seven years passed.  Incremental career shifts and family obligations took me further away from writing and testing code.  I often reflected back on 1999-2001 as a golden time, and missed building freeware.  Happily, a change in 2009 put me back on dev/test career path.

2010 -
Started WinTestGear as a more focussed revival of P.B. Systems.  Retention / employability was another motivation--too much to learn and not enough time during the day job to do it.   Used to rely on a hard work ethic and good attitude to succeed; but it takes more in today's global IT job market.  Hobby development often provides that craetive design idea, extra troubleshooting tip, or elegant technical solution that there otherwise would not have been exploration time to discover when stopping at "just-good-enough" to "meet the business need".