About

I tried to have AI write a summary for me, but it read like it was written by AI and an AI-generated executive summary for a product that is not AI-generated is an injustice. So these are my words.

Mission

Our mission is to improve the safety and efficiency in both aviation and marine environments.

History

CircumFlight started life in 2013 as airwaysandrunways.com, which did flight planning for winds at altitude, with the objective being electronic flight logging. I also released as an iOS app called airun shortly after as a way for people to log and share their flights. This was a product that I'd spend my downtime between technical contracts building.

When showing the app, it became apparent that most people don't know enough about aviation to understand the value provided and with the bones of CircumFlight, I ported it to create CircumFloat as well. It's for your boat.

Methodology and design

I always start with the data, abstract and generalize, build tools, and then I automate. The first steps in building this involved writing parsers and loaders for the raw data feeds from the FAA, running the cycle data every 28 days, validating it, finding failures in my pipelines that have matured slowly over more than a decade. I've been flying using the software for years. I have the deepest respect for anyone else who's masochistic enough to have written a GDL90, ARINC424 or an S57 parser.

I use AI tools extensively to assist with process automation, system monitoring and reporting dashboards. If it's something that I don't want to build, but is necessary, the AI tools tend to come in pretty clutch. It's years of real work from a real developer.

Alan Samet - Founder

I'm the sole developer of CircumFlight and CircumFloat. Both of these products have been an unbelievable amount of work. At the time of this writing, the codebase has eclipsed 700,000 lines of source -- I'm guessing that just under half of that is executable code. The most difficult part of writing such a product is the years of extreme isolation and solitude necessary to focus on completing it.

I'm a contract software developer with over 3000 flight hours. My grandfather was in the 7th ferrying group in WW2 and flew P39s, P40s, P47s, P51s, and P63s. After the war he started a construction company. He always told me that I needed to make some money and buy him an airplane, so to honor him, I learned to fly and eventually purchased an airplane. In 2015, I experienced a catastrophic engine failure on takeoff when leaving maintenance at less than 200ft in a Mooney. I landed in a downsloping overgrown runoff field and managed to not bend metal or hurt anyone. Statistically, I'm not even supposed to be here. In 2019, I lost a friend, instructor and mentor to a misfueling incident.

I've spent my entire career working as a contract software developer, and a good one. Unfortunately companies get sold and the team gets let go and we have to start over time and again. There is no correlation in this industry between the difficulty of the work, the amount of work, acknowledgement or appreciation or compensation. When I hit 41 years old, I was older than my father was when I lost him. I decided it was time to build something.

I grew up in the piedmont area of North Carolina. I was a below average academic performer, but I tested well. At 15, I was in an electronics class in high school and our teacher had us all take the ASVAB. I scored in the top 1% and attempted to enlist in the Navy at 17. My mother refused to cosign and I went to East Carolina University where I completed my 4-year BSBA/MIS in less than two years, graduating at 19. My SAT scores enabled me to take some additional placement exams that I'd receive college credits for. I ended up placing out of every math class required for the degree and then some, and the university also had a program that allowed me to take more than the maximum allowed courseload as long as I maintained the GPA. Short story long, I earned 120 hours over the course of two years and graduated. I wanted to drop out and I felt that college was overrated, but I knew I'd lose any right to be critical of the system if I dropped out, and I see things through to completion, so this was my compromise.

I worked my way through high school and college repairing saxophones. My first job as a 19 year-old college graduate was at IBM in RTP. At 20, I took everything I owned and piled it into a 1985 Peugeot 505 stationwagon and moved to Ybor City in Tampa Bay. I knew nobody, had no job prospects, and I had enough money to survive for two months. I'm generally not comfortable unless I feel like I'm fighting my way off of a beach. I found work with a startup pharmaceutical claims processor that we grew to $24M/yr in two years. Since then, I've worked all over the place in industry as a contract developer. I spent six years building the software used by the federal government to track container ships from 2007-2013, which is where I cut my teeth on the math for navigation. I've worked for oil refineries and equipment manufacturers, I was a lead technical architect for a major financial institution for a year. I also spent years working for the federal government as a contractor on petabyte-scale relational systems, though I generally consider myself to be a better embedded developer and mechanical designer than I am as a software developer, but software gigs tend to be a bit more comfortable.

My philosophies on business are rooted in the teachings of Alfred Chandler and managerial enterprises with additional focus on principal-agent conflicts of interest (Agency Theory). The books on my top shelf include The Gulag Archipelago, Feynman's Lectures on Physics, Mark's Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers, The Art of Electronics (and its sequel), Chapman Piloting and Seamanship, Hatcher's Notebook, The Essential Alfred Chandler, SQL for Smarties (I'm published by name in Joe Celko's second volume of SQL puzzles and answers).