Developer Spotlight: Robert Herrington, Stearns Bank

Robert’s association with computers began at the early age of 8, when he asked for an Atari 2600 video game console. He instead received a Commodore VIC-20 personal computer and a subscription to Apple Magazine, which included programs written in BASIC; thus began Robert’s career as a programmer. 

While enrolled in the Computer Science department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), Robert was a student worker at a medical data research center on campus. He was hired to update their internal reporting programs from FORTRAN to C++. That job turned into a professional position where Robert was the lead developer and wrote all the internal data reporting tools. Tasked with a critical Y2K issue, Robert turned to Visual Basic for its rapid application development. He’s since used Visual Studio and Visual Basic .NET for the past 22 years. In 2021, when the center closed, Robert found a position at Stearns Bank, which was looking for a Senior Application Engineer who was an expert in VB.

For Stearns, Robert is one of a four-member development and QA team that writes and maintains 22 separate internal applications. These applications allow users to move data between different core banking systems, storing those data in a central database, and reading data from Salesforce and reading and writing files to M-Files. Robert’s team was asked by another team if they had the ability to automatically send a Docusign document based on a template. Robert found the Docusign eSignature REST API and is now developing a documents library application that will hold documents that are frequently emailed to customers. When the signed documents are returned, the forms’ data are stored in the team’s application database. The files will be detached from Outlook, associated with the record created when the envelope was sent, and stored in M-Files. This will eliminate the need to enter that data by hand as well as providing document tracking and security.

When he’s not programming, and it’s not 115 degrees, Robert is usually in his woodworking shop crafting fine furniture. He and his wife enjoy finding new restaurants, traveling, and camping in their trailer. He also enjoys playing with his 3D printer and laser cutter.