Objective

To utilize the maximum portion of my skill set possible, while providing opportunities to grow the productivity and effectiveness of the business, using technology to create results and turn complex business logic into simple, meaningful software.

To look at the various roles I was in at GRIN, one is left wondering why I moved around so much. I started as a Software Engineer when previously I was a senior lead, and this was because I was switching programming languages from Go to PHP and had not been active in PHP development since the mid-2000s. I quickly found my footing and within around six months was promoted to Senior Software Engineer. I already had a penchant for devops, and when I discovered that setting up a new engineer's development environment was rather cumbersome and manual, I set out to Dockerize the whole thing and succeeded. This (among other things) led to my promotion to Senior DevOps Engineer.

In my position as Senior DevOps Engineer, my responsibility was to introduce containerization into many aspects of the company. Due to confidentiality and respect for trade secrets, I will not divulge exactly what it was that I was doing, but I will say that Kubernetes and Docker were my best friends. I also worked on the company's internal tools, which is a personal passion of mine. Seeing engineers' lives made easier makes me very happy, indeed.

During a reorganization, I was moved back to the Software Engineering team, and my role was changed to Senior Software Engineer. By this time I had racked up a lot of experience with varied areas of our software and infrastructure, and I was able to use that experience to help the team succeed despite a dramatically reduced workforce. I was also able to mentor on quite a few subjects to spread the knowledge around. As a fortunate turn of events, GRIN started to build microservices in Go by the time I was moved back to the Software Engineering team, and I was able to use my experience with Go to help lead the team in the right direction.

Technologies used include Laravel, Go, Docker, Kubernetes, MySQL, Redis, many AWS services, and a myriad other technologies. This was a period of refinement of all of the skills I had accumulated throughout my career, and I was able to use them to great effect. Maybe I can do the same for your company!

The experience I gained from PowerChord, Inc.—located in St. Petersburg, FL—was extensive and invaluable. I held three positions with the company, which allowed me to cross-train in a myriad different technologies. PowerChord connects brands with local customers through providing a platform with which to manage content and marketing for dealers of brands' products. Their client list includes Stihl, Alkota, Morbark, Grasshopper Mowers, Mercury Marine, and many others.

I started as a Server Software engineer with PowerChord, working on the HTTP REST API for the platform, which is written in Go. My duties included planning and implementing the data schemas for resources, building the business logic surrounding the resources, testing said logic, adding the appropriate endpoints for the resources, and testing the endpoints.

I was offered a lead role in the Quality Assurance department shortly into my time at PowerChord, which I accepted. The quality assurance department was tasked with testing both the HTTP API and the front-end interface for clients to administer their data on the platform. At the time I joined, testing in the department was still mostly manual. I was tasked with leading the charge on automating testing procedures, both on single API endpoints and on the front-end. Technologies used include Mocha and Chai using Node.js. Since I had worked on the API engineering team, I also advised my three other team members when they had questions regarding the platform.

My most recent position at PowerChord was as Lead Software Engineer for a newly-formed team of four engineers for a project that would allow site templates to be created using modularized "components" that could be reused on multiple websites and added/configured using a web interface. We utilized Go for the building of the site rendering pipeline, Go templates for the markup and styling (which used Sass), and client-side JavaScript. I was tasked with mentoring the two junior engineers and one engineer on any issues they may experience in their development, as well as planning quarterly goals for team members and the team as a whole, analyzing the platform and designing and recommending improvements to be made, pull request review, triaging new issues and refining the backlog of tickets, running meetings to decide story points for sprints using planning poker, and stepping in to help with development when workload was high or urgent issues arose.

Saint Petersburg, Florida-based retail management, staffing, and training outsourcer, SalesMakers, Inc. (formerly Retail Business Development), hired me on as the first full-time developer. The company has since expanded to a four-developer team.

We created an enterprise web application for a mobile workforce that delivers powerful sales and inventory tracking across multiple clients and projects, payroll and commission automation, complex business reporting, contest and bonus calculation, support services, online training resources to sales associates in the field, executives, management and back-office personnel. This solution efficiently managed over 1,500 sales associates in hundreds of retail stores across the U.S. at its peak, accounting for up to a 4.5x increase in productivity/performance and up to an 80% cost savings as opposed to previous methods of manual tracking, calculation, and training.

The initial application was designed and implemented using a Java/J2EE backend ERP system named Openbravo, along with lightweight, responsive, mobile-friendly HTML5 and CSS3. Also developed as a frontend was a native Android application for sales associates and management. Even in the first year of my employment, the solutions processed millions of dollars in revenue and tracked hundreds of thousands of customer interactions.

As the business grew, it was evident that we required a custom software application not based on any pre-made solution. Our team developed a Ruby on Rails application to replace the existing Java application, built completely from the ground up, following test-driven development methodology, and adhering closely to Agile principles. We also added in more large features such as an employee scheduler and a job applicant tracking system.

Over the course of my employment, I used technologies including Twilio, high-complexity PostgreSQL queries, Foundation, AJAX, jQuery, multiple automated ETL import and export processes, Nginx and Passenger 5, Memcached, Capistrano, CodeShip continuous integration with Rackspace servers, Pundit, Sunspot/Solr, Google and Bing Maps integration, and a myriad web services APIs.

In 2007, I opened Lumination Solutions, a sole proprietorship in Polk County, Florida, with the intent of designing and developing websites for clients in the area. As the business quickly grew, I realized that my true strength was in development and, though I had a reasonable working knowledge of design, development was my true strength. For this reason, I acquired a partner to complement my development knowledge with excellent design.

Lumination Solutions became heavily involved in delivering beautiful, high-functioning Wordpress solutions for clients, using PHP to tailor the themes and custom plugins to provide exactly the functionality and appearance that clients desired. Later, after joining Retail Business Development, more web work was created for the company that runs along the same lines as the work that I was involved in when self-employed.