experiences
Senior Software Engineer
2022 – Present
  • Co-led the design and development of a first-of-its-kind E-Gifting experience for the Goldbelly food E-Commerce platform with a React Frontend and Rails Backend to enable user sharing of personalized culinary experiences from legendary chefs and award-winning restaurants. These pre-payment features for purchases containing perishable goods enabled frictionless ordering with solely an email address; leaving delivery details and timing to recipients.
  • Co-led the vision and implementation of incorporating StackOverflow for enterprises into our engineering and customer support structures to promote rapid collaboration and consistent solutions.
Senior Software Engineer
2020 – 2022
  • Led development and served as the Technical Lead for the launch of a Chain Billing Project by architecting and implementing the backend API and transitioning legacy APIs and code structures to utilize a newly designed data model.
  • Empowered and led a dynamic and skilled development team by driving key development initiatives, including the establishment of an industry panel, the 155-member Ruby Guild, and a Rubyist Book Club for testing techniques in Rspec.
  • Championed collaboration and effective leadership in code by reviewing PRs, pairing to remove blockers, assisting with outages, and helping develop and test new coding patterns.
  • Reinforcing a culture of inclusivity, diversity, empathy, and empowerment remotely by fostering collaboration and hosting 1-on-1 chats with each and every engineer during a period of rapid growth.
Senior Software Engineer
2019 – 2020
  • Design and develop key features to enhance the functionality of an enterprise lending platform processing $110MM+ in financial assets per year.
  • Hire, train, and mentor a remote team of four software engineers to increase overall productivity while improving code quality.
Director of Engineering
2019
  • Hired to lead the development of an on-demand staffing platform to enable dental professionals to find work on a flexible schedule and dental practices to ensure service availability and improve the patient experience by fully staffing their offices.
  • Partner with the founding team, head of product, and creative director to design, develop, and execute the product roadmap with a focus on building features to support monetization and securing early adopters to gather user feedback. This included implementing SCRUM to drive team productivity and performance.
  • Personally built engineering integrations and implemented automation to reduce platform complexity and improve performance for external customers, and the internal customer support team.
  • Documented platform architecture and passwords to secure the stack and create a knowledge base, reducing ramp-up time for new engineers joining the team.
  • Migrated the code base from Bitbuck to Github to take advantage of more streamlined tooling, setup continuous integration for automated testing, implement security scans, and develop style guide tests.
Senior Application Developer
2018 – 2019
  • Successfully launched LearningLAB, a platform that helps enterprises fortify their workforce against cyber threats and privacy breaches. Led backend testing and established best practices to achieve optimal software quality.
  • Designed a full-stack dependency management process for our two monolithic ruby-on-rails applications.
  • Improved code cleanliness and readability by teaching the team about how linting can be used to increase productivity and working with the engineers to implement linting in the code base.
Senior Backend Engineer
2017 – 2018
  • Led hiring, onboarding, and training of engineers and the first SCRUM project manager for the backend team.
  • Planned and architected Licensing 2.0 which required a multi-stage multi-epic rollout process. Completed multiple epics of 100 files each that impacted every component related to design content in the backend API.
  • Cut test processing time from 25 minutes to 8 minutes by converting legacy Minitest specs to Rspec and implementing parallel test execution on CI.
Senior Software Engineer
2016 – 2017
  • Built a detailed patient logic report utilizing recursion to enable patient metric analysis & interpretation for a customer in the medical industry.
  • Engineered the foundations required to move a client off of MongoDB both to increase efficiency and cut costs.
  • Refactored Coding Zeal’s referral program website to provide customers with a consistent & accessible UI/UX, increase customer satisfaction, and improve lead conversions.
Senior Full Stack Developer
2016
  • Engineered an Inbound and Outbound ETL Microservice with API to relay communications between 3rd party providers & our monorail in real time and provide flexibility for varying provider complexity.
  • Instituted Slack and Git Flow modeled to improve code quality, test coverage, and communication. Created room configurations to support cross-collaboration between on-site and remote engineering, sales, & customer teams.
BilingualHire
Senior Full Stack Engineer
2016
  • Re-engineered an MVP focused on placing bilingual candidates in jobs across the United States.
  • Optimized the user sign up workflow by simplifying content creation from launch to point of sale, retooling every user interface, and adjusting the data model to support many new language types.
Director of Application Engineering
2014 – 2015
Web Applications Engineer
2009 – 2014
  • Managed the construction of a Ruby on Rails based Service Oriented Architecture to drive content to over 600 statically generated websites, handle increased site traffic on Black Friday, deliver new content, and reduce DevOps overhead costs.
  • Built a culture of learning by implementing online courses, real-time pairing, and career mentoring to reduce knowledge silos, grow junior developers, and reduce project completion times.
  • Refactored the code deployment process to Git Flow via GitHub from SVN in order to improve the stability of the CI environment and increase the speed of code deployments.
  • Revamped the RetailHub Enterprise Content Management Software. Replaced 10 years of legacy code & organized customer tools in a single workspace to increase application performance & improve client satisfaction. Transformed legacy communications and increased collaboration & efficiency by implementing Slack enterprise-wide.
Applications Developer
2008 – 2009
  • Refactored internal project management software to support international languages and character sets.
  • Increased project management collaboration and reduced task duplication during the Burj Khalifa construction project by developing a company-wide project and task tracker.
Team Leader – Web Technology
2001 – 2007
  • Managed a team of 5 engineers across the Midwest region and created consistency by establishing writing development processes, software style guidelines, scalability standards, and pair programming sessions.
  • Reduced expenses, increased productivity, and prevented fraud by engineering a metrics-driven multi-tiered dashboard application serving actionable data to the enterprise.
  • Increased customer satisfaction scores, reduced outages, & reduced repair visits by standardizing online process delivery and creating mission-critical applications with 24/7 uptime & real-time administrative updates.
Founder & Senior Full Stack Engineer
2016 – Present
Hired by companies to work on every part of the SDLC, from product inception, roadmap development, and hands-on programming to launch, customer implementation, and maintenance. Built and trained internal teams on software quality best practices to create a sustainable engineering culture that can execute on the most challenging business objectives.
  • Arthur Maxwell: Rearchitected an offline iPad-driven eLearning management and classroom application with enterprise clients across the globe to web-based learning using the latest Hotwire, Stimulus, Turbo, and Ruby on Rails libraries.
  • SafeAccess: Developed a talent pipeline and hired a senior Ruby on Rails engineer to backfill the co-founder and senior technical architect of the application.
  • Sidebench: Serving as a Technical Architect for the Momints NFT Marketplace by researching architecture, selecting components based on scalability needs and risk mitigation, developing the MVP, and compiling marketing materials. Provide high-level documentation on recommendations for system architecture diagrams, server infrastructure, tech stack selection, 3rd Party dependencies, data models and database schema, and API specifications to drive development.
  • Advanced Building Technology: Utilized responsive web design construction techniques to rearchitect version two of this corporation's website. While version one was not mobile or tablet friendly, iPhones, iPads, and desktops are all now supported. It was successfully launched on time in preparation for new product kickoffs.
  • Eggplant: Expanded the authorization capability of the testing manager application to include Microsoft Active Directory (LDAP). Coordinated daily pair programming sessions to mentor junior engineers, improve team collaboration, and increase overall team performance.
  • Crowd OX: Built out platform features across three ruby-on-rails engines. Rewrote the Partner application testing suite porting it from Minitest to the latest version of RSpec while maintaining testing coverage metrics. Expanded testing coverage from 0% to over 60% in a legacy code base with 100% model testing coverage.
  • W. W. Norton: Designed and architected an interactive delivery platform to serve over 300+ interactives for a global publisher. Setup the GitFlow Process, code reviews, quality guidelines, & workflow management. Coached & mentored junior engineers on best practices to increase their productivity & contributions to the code base.
  • USA Today: Developed and architected a backend CMS with frontend content creation interfaces & features. Optimized user flows & improved the customer experience by designing an updated responsive layout.
  • Gathrly: Partnered with company founders to create a technical product roadmap and setup agile processes. Designed, engineered, and maintained a lead management application utilized by top tier brewers. Coached and mentored a team of junior engineers to meet productivity goals and ensure high-performance.
My dad always taught me you are going to get your ass kicked time and time again in life, it doesn't matter how you got knocked down, it matters what you do when you get back up. When it comes to products I have had my share of failures but I never stop trying.
Thomas Edison once wrote...
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
If you feel the lightbulb is a little dated, here another favorite from Elon Musk regarding innovation...
"It is important to reason from first principles, rather than, by analogy. So the normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. We're doing this because it's like something else that was done or like what other people are doing. Iterations on a theme. It's kinda mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles. First principles is kinda a physics way of looking at the world and what that really means is you kinda boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say okay, what are we sure is true? or sure as possible is true? and then reason up from there. That takes a lot more mental energy."
I believe we live in amazing times, filled with opportunity. Where a collective set of individuals can work together to change the world. This means thinking differently. Finding and solving real problems, and reasoning from first principles. I know I have failed many times, but part of life is fighting for the life you want to live.
Let's write our own story!
education
Master of Business Administration
Chicago, Illinois
Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems
Jacksonville, Illinois
community
Turing School of Software & Design
Mentor & Volunteer Teacher
2020 - Present
Las Vegas, Nevada
Boulder Ruby Group
Regular Attendee
2019 - Present
Boulder, Colorado
Full Stack PDX Meetup
Founder
2017 – 2019
Portland, Oregon
Mentorship Saturdays PDX Meetup
Mentor
2016 – 2019
Portland, Oregon
Ruby on Rails PDX Meetup
Founder
2016 - 2017
Portland, Oregon
conferences
November 18th - 20th, 2019
Nashville, Tennessee
April 30th - May 2nd, 2019
Minneapolis, Minnesota
November 13th - 15th, 2018
Los Angeles, California
April 25th - 27th, 2017
Phoenix, Arizona
Ruby on Ales
March 5th – 6th, 2015
Bend, Oregon
April 22nd - 25th, 2014
Chicago, Illinois
Ruby on Ales
March 6th – 7th, 2014
Bend, Oregon
Cascadia Ruby
October 21st - 22nd, 2013
Portland, Oregon
jQuery Conference
June 13th - 14th, 2013
Portland, Oregon
April 29th - May 2nd, 2013
Portland, Oregon
Let's Connect!