Opendate was built to be the operating system of a music venue. From talent discovery, outreach, offers, calendaring, and show management, it is the one-stop-shop to manage your music venue.My personal role in building Opendate has been to take it from zero to one. I've handled all engineering tasks such as building the backend, frontend, API, infrastructure, working with contractors, etc.We started with the idea to build a data-driven recommendation engine capable of filling open nights for the music venue. This involved consuming a large amount of data so the system had knowledge of every artist, music venue, and music event available. Once we had this data, we could make informed recommendations for artists an individual talent buyer for a venue should go after.This lead to building out a "deal" pipeline for booking talent. A talent buyer could send and receive communications with artist managers, send offers, and follow up if necessary all through the application. Then, once the show is booked, everything related to the show can be stored in a single page so that all parties have a single source of truth for an event. Some examples of things we store are:* Performers (support and headliners)* Offers sent to performers* Social media (and marketing spend) related to the event* Notes (both public and private)* Contacts for the event* And any file assets needed (traditionally shared through email and hard to find)Opendate also has a ticketing system so that we can set up tickets, promo codes, and add-ons for our shows. This feature has a companion iOS app that uses our API so that venue employees can sell tickets at the door during an event, and can check in guests by scanning the QR code on their ticket.

Dropkiq was built after an observation at my enterprise day job, which was that Liquid syntax was extremely difficult for non-programmers to write. Our company relied on Liquid to make our highly customizable software work for each customer. However, in our company with over 2,000 people, only a small handful of (non-programmer) employees had a good understanding. Liquid tickets would get escalated from department to department until our software engineers were spending time writing Liquid (costing the company valuable developer time). Additionally, as the leader of the software team, I lead several efforts to try to make Liquid easier for people, but the efforts seemed to always fall short of what was really needed.At first, I was unsure of how to solve this problem. I aggressively built prototypes of different solutions and worked with potential customers to evaluate each solution. Eventually, the Dropkiq product became a Javascript library that can be used with any WYSIWYG editor that will make suggestions (in the form of a dropdown menu) as you're writing Liquid.In addition to building the product, I worked closely with a designer to create the brand, marketing materials, social advertisements, etc. I worked with contractors for parts of the business I needed help with, including running social media ads based on keywords. I did a lot of cold email outreach, took sales calls, did software demos, and was successfully able to sell the product to some companies in this way.Dropkiq continues to have customers that love it and use it every day (including my previous enterprise employer). However, it was not able to gain the traction to work on it full time. I continue to communicate with my customers, demo to new prospects, and provide any needed support.

PartnerHQ was built out of observation at BFG... BFG had a unique solution called the "Locker Room" to inform participants in the tournament of all the information that they needed to know including a timeline, social post templates, general information, etc. A major company saw that BFG participating nonprofits had a high engagement rate and reached out to ask how we were able to engage them so well.PHQ became that solution. It was built as a way for organizations to offer the same locker room experience as BFG for their partners of any kind. With the application, you are able to upload your list of partners, resources, tasks, and allow the system to manage them in order to get this done. This replaces hundreds (or thousands) of emails that would have previously been sent by a human and gives that human a dashboard to easily track progress instead. This solution has caught on in the fitness world and has already been used in events such as the Rogue Invitational, the Crossfit Games, and more.In addition to our core product, we have also developed a fundraising tool. This tool combines the "locker room" concept to provide nonprofits with needed information with an easy-to-use checkout experience for donors. This product has been used by Travelers Insurance and Rocket Mortgage to raise millions of dollars for charity.

I joined BFG as the second volunteer Software developer.BFG has helped me as a software developer to round out my skills as not only being able to develop working features, but also build interfaces with polish that users expect. I've been involved in many projects including: The second iteration of the bracket interface (which is the center of attention during the tournament), a complete website redesign, establishing a state machine for the tournament, round, match, etc models that drive each fundraiser, the checkout process, and moreI've also been involved in customer-based projects for BFG where we've adapted the code-base to run custom BFG-like tournaments. In the most recent project, I helped adapt the match architecture to support list-based contests, while still supporting the bracket-based contests the main business needs in order to operate.During my time as software development director, I have coordinated communication between the development team and other departments, and helped establish best practices to scale the development team. I've managed software projects outsourced to a local development shop as well as growing the development volunteer team.

I started at MOBI as an intern and have worked in many roles: Intern, Software Developer, Senior Software Developer, Technical Lead, and finally Team LeadMy biggest contributions to MOBI have been in the core systems that are currently being maintained by a large team of developers. These include: The front-end ordering system used to select what you would like to purchase, the approval system used to approve orders, Autobot email processing system used to automate workflows based on received emails, I was involved in a Rails upgrade while a team of developers was developing features with the old Rails version, Maintaining the legacy 'Activity' (ticketing) system, Globalization of the application (translations, addresses, phone numbers, etc.), and more.As team lead, I manage a team of developers responsible for the workflow processes of MOBI. We are currently creating a workflow implementation based on BPMN that will make many of the existing MOBI systems obsolete and increase MOBI's business value to customers. I have experience both managing the project from a technical perspective, but also from an HR perspective (leading team meetings, holding one-on-ones, etc.)I'm also heavily involved in the Culture at MOBI as a part of a small Culture team. We organize company-wide events in the office to make MOBI a great place to work at. Some of the recent events I've helped organize include 'MOBI Olympics' where employees can participate in competitions to win prizes, and a coffee fundraiser where former baristas made specialty coffees to raise money for charity.

I joined Challonge as a co-founder as the second person on the team.My main focus was software development where I was involved in day-to-day maintenance, as well as some larger efforts such as: Participant management UI, Website UI redesign, Re-architecting the codebase as a Rails engine, Establishing Challonge Premier subscription service using Stripe, Team-based tournaments, Comment system updates, and more.We also built two "Madness" products for customers wanting to run custom prediction brackets in March. This not only involved building a working product from scratch with a small team (with all the UI polish you would expect from a finished product), but also selling this product to interested companies.I also built a proprietary ELO ranking system capable of supporting editing/deleting old matches, which is a one of a kind system needed to support a website like Challonge where users have complete control over their tournaments.I had non-engineering contributions on the team including: Marketing efforts for some of the gaming related events we did, Decisions around the Challonge Premier subscription service using churn data, Customer service related experience responding to user submitting ticketsChallonge was acquired by Split Media Labs in July 2016.

Mast essentially bought a perpetual license of MOBI's codebase in order to expedite the development of their MVNO carrier portal. I helped interview the initial Mast developers, and worked with the Mast team remotely for one year while still employed by MOBI.As a MOBI employee, it was my responsibility to audit the MOBI codebase and database to ensure MOBI and customer data security. Once the codebase was prepared for Mast, I initially helped the team understand the codebase and architecture by preparing learning materials. I participating in re-architecting MOBI and then also acted as a software developer on the team.Much of the work I did on this project involved re-working MOBI systems to better fit Mast as the source of truth in the system, and as a Carrier consumers could buy (as opposed to enterprise companies).