Resume

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Credentials and Education

Experience

I’m a Technical Director currently employed by Isobar, a Boston based Internet consulting company. My job varies pretty widely by the project to which I’m currently assigned. In the past, I’ve worked on these projects [technologies used in brackets]:

  • Provide leadership in the Boston office and ad-hoc consulting for projects organization wide
  • Migrate multiple USAF applications from on-premises hosting (ex Java 6 on Solaris using IBM MQ) to elastic, high availability fault tolerant AWS/Azure hosting (ex using Java 8, Glassfish or Tomcat, Linux) [Docker, Glassfish, Tomcat, Java, Maven, CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk]
  • Technical lead, architect, and trusted strategic and technical advisor for large online brokerage. Features responsive design, content management, and extensive integration with legacy systems. [ASP.NET, Javascript, Webpack, Gulp]
  • Technical lead, architect, and trusted strategic and technical advisor for large hotel and resorts chain. Features responsive design, content management, and WCAG accessibility. [Drupal, PHP, MySQL, Acquia, Amazon Web Services]
  • Drive technical aspects of multiple sales opportunities.
  • Technical lead, architect, and trusted strategic and technical advisor for the new Harvard University alumni portal. Engagement also involved training Harvard developers in current development, architecture, and system administration best practices. [Java, Oracle, Spring, Amazon S3, CAS]
  • Technical lead and architect for Mackenzie Investments effort to develop a new web site for the public, investors, and advisors. Lead large team composed of coworkers, contractors, client employees, and vendors. The site features a responsive design scaling from mobile phones to large screen monitors backed by a CMS allowing for business to update the site without IT. [Grails, Groovy, Java, OpenText, Jenkins, Google Search Appliance, AIX, Oracle, Nightwatchjs, Nodejs, Wro4j, Jenkins]
  • Lead architect on State Street effort to develop a new system for fund managers and specials. [Google Web Toolkit, Java, Jenkins]
  • Architect for Adidas miCoach: Revamped build system, introduced continuous integration, added unit and integration testing, implemented best practices, migrated from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0, from web forms to ASP.NET MVC 3, upgraded SQL Server from 2005 to 2008, and more. The team kept releasing new features the whole time, productivity and quality rose. [C#, ASP.NET, Jenkins, TeamCity, MSBuild, Web Deploy, SQL Server]
  • Lead architect and developer of the Motorola MOTOACTV Android app. Designed the architecture for the app, the server side that the application syncs with, and communication protocol (RESTful JSON/Smile). Led a team of fellow employees, contractors, and Motorola personnel. Also contributed to the motoactv web site. [Roboguice, OrmLite, Jackson, ant, ivy, achartengine, HttpClient and HttpClient-Cache, Spring Android / Rest Template, Spring 3.1, Cassandra]
  • Winner of the Isobar Create 48 Hackathon with the “OnTap” app
  • Created CallerID for Android which tells the user who is calling before they answer. Available on the Android Play Store, on Amazon, and for direct download [PHP, Android, Roboguice, Memcache]
  • Contributor to StatusNet, the software that power the popular microblogging sites identi.ca and twit army [PHP, Apache, MySql, Postgres, Memcache, XMPP]
  • Technical lead for significant part of a WebSphere Commerce Server implementation for Academy (a major sporting goods chain) [Java, WebSphere Commerce, DB2, WebSphere Application Server]
  • Architect for Putnam Investments initiative to redesign the 401k management dashboard [Portlets, Liferay, Java]
  • Created Celtics 3-Point Play Facebook game, and later evolved the game so it could also be used by the Boston Bruins [PHP, Apache, MySql]
  • Developed hybrid e-commerce and community site as the main web presence of one of the major American cellular carriers [Java, Spring, Hibernate, Velocity, Tomcat, MySql, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Apache, Tomcat]
  • Developer for the new OLPC community site [PHP, Smarty, MySql]
  • Programmed user friendly web-based CMS frontend for Adidas [ASP.NET 3.5, C#, Tridion]
  • Technical lead for the re-creation of the web presence of Reebok. The project includes: requirements gathering, preliminary high level design, architecture (including the integration of 4 backend products, 1 front end product, 1 visual design agency, and a translation agency), implementation, team coordination, testing (QA and UAT), documentation, and deployment. [Java, Spring, Maven, Weblogic, FreeMarker, Flash, SOAP, Tridion, Oracle]
  • Engineer on the HumanaOne PlanPointer project. HumanaOne PlanPointer is an AJAX web application designed to help consumers find out which health plan is right for them. It graphically represents each plan’s relevance, and asks refinement questions to help narrow down the options, ultimately allowing the user to apply for the plan of their choice. As an engineer, I didn’t design the UI, but I did implement it and make it all work, from backend communications to the front end javascript (along with another engineer and a user experience specialist). The system is build using ASP.NET 2.0, C#, and MS AJAX.NET. You can read about some of my experiences on my blog post entitled “Microsoft Only Ajax Application”. Want to check out Planpointer? The application is presently only available in a few states. If you want to give it a test drive, try “70001” as your zip code. [ASP.NET, ASP.NET Ajax, C#, MS SQL Server]
  • Reebok RunEasy developer. I worked in a small team of user experience designers and engineers to develop the goruneasy.com web site, a Web 2.0 social networking site for runners. The site features a Google Maps mashup showing user contributed runs. It also has a forum, text message receiving, flickr posting/mashup, user created videos, and iTunes integration. The site is compatible with IE6 and 7, and Firefox 2+. We used Prototype and Scriptaculous as the Javascript libraries, and Microsoft ASP.NET / C# as the backend. The campaign ran world wide in 2007, and received a few awards. [ASP.NET, ASP.NET Ajax, C#, MS SQL Server]
  • Creation, from scratch, of a new Web 2.0 social networking site for a large advertising company. I must say, the technology was very awesome, and the architecture clean. Unfortunately, the company scrapped the project following code complete about a month before deployment for reasons I can’t disclose. Some of the code is scattered around some of their web properties, though, so not all is lost. [Java, Spring, Maven, Velocity, Hibernate, EJB3, MS SQL Server]
  • Development of a demonstration mobile facing web site written in Java, leveraging WURFL for device capability detection and abstraction. [Java, WML]
  • CMS implementation for Aetna insurance, including requirements gathering, content analysis, taxonomy design, system architecture, installation, and implementation. Interwoven Worksite MP was the CMS (well, really a Document Management System, but we used it like a Content Management System).
  • Development of an internal project metrics tracking tool written in C# and Microsoft AJAX.NET (then known as “Atlas”). I also tried to get it to work on Mono, but didn’t quite get there (I’d love to try again!)

While I’m engaged in a project, I never fail to find things which seem suboptimal. For example, I realized that if we had an outlet for knowledge sharing, we could share the great work done between teams, so each team didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. My philosophy is that if I see something that could be improved, I improve it. Therefore, in addition to the projects I’ve been assigned to, I have also engaged in these efforts which I started and developed:

  • Introduction of a continuous integration system (Hudson now Jenkins). I originally was using for just the project I was on, but decided to set it up for anyone to use.
  • Switch from Microsoft VSS (Visual Source Safe) to SVN (Subversion). When I started at the company, I was not impressed by VSS, to say the least. It was slow, proprietary, and worst of all, became corrupted and lost data. I found this completely unacceptable, so I requested a server, installed Ubuntu, Apache, mod_svn, wrote a few scripts, integrated LDAP account management, and gave the company a reliable, fast version control system. Soon, all projects at the company switched away from VSS to SVN.
  • Introduction of Trac. Continuing my quest for an open, dependable project environment, I was disappointed in the tools used to manage issue lists and milestones (namely, spreadsheets). So I introduced Trac. Because of the greater-than-Excel learning curve, migration has been slow, but a few projects so far have leveraged it.
  • Creation of an internal company wiki. I received buy in from the proper people, then created an instance of MediaWiki which I customized to take advantage of unique features of Molecular’s environment via MediaWiki’s plugin system. I organized a small group of volunteers who created the initial information architecture and taxonomy, then we bootstrapped the system with some base content. The wiki is now favored over the competing Sharepoint system by many people.
  • Creation of an internal/external company blog. Again, I rounded up supporters and selected WordPress as the blogging platform. With a combination of standard and custom written plugins, I created the The Squeeze, the Isobar Blog. Experience designers created the theme, and finally the blog was launched externally.
  • Dabbled in CakePHP, shell scripting, and a bunch of other languages and frameworks
  • Run my own server based on Gentoo (what better way to learn about Linux?) that hosts XMPP, email, this web site site, and more and includes IPv6 connectivity (why yes, I am a Hurricane Electric certified IPv6 “Sage”)