Aaron H. Email & Phone Number

Ithaca, Ny, Us

I provide technical expertise, do some web application development, write content (first book published in late 2022!), and do some game design for the tabletop role-playing game _STILLFLEET_.

Washington, District Of Columbia, Us

Backend engineering (Ruby on Rails) with an emphasis on feature enhancements, mentorship of juniors, performance optimizations, error correction in a mid-level volume (tens-of-millions of records for some tables) environment.

Chantilly, Virginia, Us

I work on a small (~15) team of developers on a portfolio of projects that are primarily Rails based with some ***** front-end code. Most work is feature development with the occasional bugfix. We have a pretty regular practice of refactoring technical debt where possible. I've also done some workflow analysis to identify potential inefficiencies, as well as vet newer technology solutions (such as ActionView Components) for feasibility in our application portfolio.I created the MVP for our "Digital Signature" app, which allows for legal-approved document signing to happen in socially-distanced contexts. The app is lightweight and took about a week to develop and is currently being used. Our teams are relatively flat, and work is mediated through PMs.

Diaperbase is an open-source multi-tenant inventory-management application to facilitate DiaperBanks (think "food banks" but for sanitary supplies). After nearly 3 years of development, we went into Production on 2 November, 2018, and are actively maintaining the application. As the vast majority of DiaperBanks are volunteer-driven, the software is offered free of charge.My responsibilities primarily consisted of steering the application, doing ongoing discovery with participants to uncover new ways that we can facilitate their processes, reviewing Pull Requests by our volunteers, occasionally getting to spike out new features, and pairing / mentoring with newer developers.After 4 years of leading this project, I have stepped down and turned the reins over to a new lead. My goal was to bring this project to market and get it used, and it is currently being used by over 100 organizations, nationwide, and is recognized by the National Diaper Bank Network as the de facto inventorying tool for Diaper Banks to use. I am proud to have led this project to where it is today. I am staying on as a consultant / haver-of-tribal-knowledge.

Columbus, Ohio, Us

This position was ended for COVID-19 related reasons.I worked on an integrations team to bring on new companies, creating custom instances of our application for Insurance companies who wanted to retain our services. My time in this position was sadly brief, but while there I did get to work on some optimizations that reduced the memory footprint of a rather large data-load to about 10% of its original size by converting a very large hash object into a surgically-designed ordered list. Other work was predominantly light maintenance and bugfixes.

For this role I was on the Customer Experience team, specifically for customer acquisitions (getting people to sign up for the service).Our workflow was PM driven on biweekly sprints with a heavy focus on feature development pushing forwards. PMs provided retrospective insight via A/B tests and metric analysis to help us identify whether or not features were beneficial to this end. My accessibility experience was also handy in both remediating a11y issues (we had a spate of them come up after a consultant review) as well as co-spearheading an internal a11y working group to work as a resource for a11y issues. I wrote an internal doc about common a11y remediation methodologies.Outside of my immediate work, I also helped to improve the efficiency of our test suite, which began at 80-90 mins (45-60 mins in CI) total execution time and when I left it was under an hour (locally) and approaching 10-15 mins on CI.

Reston, Virginia, Us

Developed Ruby on Rails software for USCIS. This work included peer reviews, mentorship, lots of refactoring, software design, writing tests, discovery and triaging work, being "that guy" when my co-workers suggested things I disagreed with. Technology was primarily Ruby on Rails (backed by PostgreSQL, Redis, with a splash of Oracle).

Ithaca, Ny, Us

Working in a small team (< 10) on both maintenance of existing web applications (Rails / PHP) and development of new applications, all developed on a LAPP stack on an Ubuntu-server.Version control was done through Perforce and Git. Oracle & PostgreSQL for databases.Apps are either private intranet applications to facilitate content management (database-interfacing) for OUs or public-facing applications for general use. Recently, we've been doing more with microservices, exposing API endpoints for cross-app consumption. Team puts a strong emphasis on tests, especially TDD wherever possible. We use Factory Girl, Capybara, Poltergeist and a combination of RSpec and default unit/functionals for testing frameworks. jQuery for front-end scripting, and SASS for CSS compiling.

Richmond, In, Us

Maintaining iue.edu, a website with over 5,000 pages of content. I manage all the templating (Dreamweaver), CSS, and accessible HTML. I code applications in PHP/AJAX/JavaScript, and occasionally in C#.NET. I also maintain the databases (MySQL and T-SQL), draw data from the centralized student records database (Oracle). I participated in steering and directing the future of digital media here at IU East in conjunction with the Marketing / External Affairs department.

Richmond, In, Us

Maintained 200 computers on the municipal WAN. Served as resident linux administrator (Debian flavor) for both mailserver and webserver. Wrote BASH scripts, configured SpamAssassin and reduced the City's SPAM intake by 10-fold through scripted nightly SA training.Re-wrote the city's website using a hand-written DB back-end with page editor; Features included full-text search-capable content, Municipal Code tagged and searchable in a database, and content management system written by hand.

Bachelors, Natural Science & Mathematics

Ruby & Ruby On Rails

A.S., Accounting

Incomplete, Commercial Photography