From Investigator to Innovator

 The journey behind Case Bunker is a personal one, driven by a passion for investigations and a love for writing code. 

 After 14 years as an investigator, I wrote some software called XTrack. By today's standards it was quite simple. It allowed you to create an incident, write a report, and print it. XTrack sold fairly well, but the lure of big money in the Y2K craze pulled me away from writing software for investigators. That is, except for nearly every night when I would dream about creating something far bigger. An app that would work on every device out there in its native language. No more taking shortcuts to make the Internet God's happy.

You see, work has always been my hobby as well. I just love writing code and I have done so for over 20 of the Fortune 100 companies. Web pages just cannot do what native apps can. They are getting closer, but due to some very boring constraints instituted by some very powerful people in the software business, the web will never be equal to the stuff you install. I wrote a book about it in 2006. Not that much has changed in that arena since then.

As technology advanced, so did the tools for writing software. The features you could include in it grew exponentially.

 A lot changed when Microsoft decided to get into the open source business with everyone else. Their development tools are now mostly free and feature packed. What got my attention the most was something called Xamarin. Kinda catchy ain't it? With Xamarin you could write code once and deploy it to iPhone, Android Phones, and a few others as well as Windows of course. Xamarin was cool and all, but there were many gotchas as well. Then in 2016 Microsoft decided to replace Xamarin with something called .NET MAUI. It sputtered along for a few years and then it took off like a rocket. It became the thing Xamarin wanted to be. A complete, capable, and stable platform for building those cross-platform apps I always dreamed of. (We developers dream about some odd things, don't we?)

All the while .NET MAUI was maturing, more and more technology was maturing with it. Things like GPS, speech-to-text, semantic search, predictive analytics, and much more. My dreams of a better XTrack grew into a string of sleepless nights sketching out the ‘perfect’ software for investigators. It had to cover every type of investigator, not just PI’s or corporate investigators. I needed to make my new software sing.

In the end, as the team grew, we decided on a mere 22 basic investigative types. We knew that wouldn't cover nearly all the investigators out there. We needed to allow users to select from one of those platforms and easily build it out to fit their own needs. It needed to be ultra customizable with case types for every type of case they encountered and the fields, pages, and reports to go with them. It needed to be the thing I kept dreaming about.

 I had a big decision to make. I could simply retire and enjoy my dog Rye, or, I could go back to the grind of writing code 16 hours a day. I suppose you have already figured out what my decision was. Remember, writing code is my hobby. There are only a couple of things I enjoy more and I am told I can't write about those things where children might stumble across them. So here I am writing the ‘About’ copy for the web site. It is 10:08 AM Monday morning and I have been sitting here since 8:30 AM yesterday. Yeah, I love it that much. Rye got tired hours ago. She is sleeping on her bed in the next room. 

 Now we have Case Bunker. I chose the name because security is so very important to investigators and Case Bunker is as secure as you can get with end-to-end encryption. There are tons more features you can start reading about here on this website. All those investigation types, standard features you will find in nearly any good case and incident management software; advanced features like semantic search, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI); and of course, enterprise features like scalable infrastructure, audit trails, and role-based access control.

Wow, this page grew more than I thought it would. You can probably see how proud I am of Case Bunker and my journey to get to where we are today. I can’t take full credit though, I had a ton of offshore help and a little onshore as well. Some of those guys in Bangladesh are magic to say the least. They need a Masters Degree just to compete over there and it isn't rare for one to have a Doctoral as well. They are fast, efficient and although I am not so proud of this one, they are cheap. They will remain in the picture as 3rd level support. Levels one and two will be right here in the USA. Imagine that, native English speakers helping native English speakers.

Like I say, I can’t take full credit for Case Bunker. While the architecture and data model were all mine there were many others in the background pushing and pulling me all the way. Microsoft chipped in with a few key elements and AI was a big player, helping write much of the boilerplate code and always finding the best practice. Case Bunker now comprises nearly 100,000 lines of carefully crafted code. It is my magnum opus and will remain so for the foreseeable. I have already found a few investigators to stand in my place when I can no longer stand at the helm. It isn't as difficult to find investigators that can write code as you might think.

Thanks for taking the time to read our About page. I am sure you will find the software to be everything I described, and much more.

Paul Pleasant, Developer, CaseBunker