Machinify is a healthcare tech company that is bringing the power of AI to the extremely complex world of healthcare in the United States. Our offerings span three different areas of the healthcare space: Auth, Audit, and Pay. I work in the Auth area, where the goal is to make it as quick and easy as possible for healthcare providers to authorize treatments with insurance companies prior to treatment delivery. In my role as a Staff Software Engineer I work on the backend Scala-based application. This application is responsible for gathering in the vast amount of information that goes into creating a Prior Authorization request, validating it, and sending it off to other 3rd party systems to be further verified and approved or rejected. Each procedure or diagnosis requires different information, so our system must be flexible enough to know which questions to ask under which circumstances. We also have a document processing function with allows providers to upload medical documents to their Auth request. Our system then performs Optical Character Recognition on these documents and is able to automatically find "points of interest" in the documents that pertain directly to the Auth request.As far as problem domains go, this is the most complex one I have come across in my 30 years of writing software professionally. Coming up to speed on this domain was a great challenge, and the company's success or failure depends upon how able we are to capture this complexity in code that is delivers the needed functionality but is not so complex itself that it becomes unmaintainable. Scala, being a hybrid functional and object oriented language, is a great choice for this type of work. A key part of my job is to shore up the group's Scala expertise and to help us leverage the richness of the language.

Wonder Workshop is an Education Tech company that makes robots that help kids learn to code. My title at the company is "Back-end Architect", but I also do most of the server-side coding as well. In this role, I am responsible for maintaining the legacy back-end services and for migrating them into our new Play! Framework service architecture. Additionally, I do lots of work with AWS to try to streamline the operations and reduce the cost of running the system.After 2 years working full time with the company, I switched over to a part-time contracting role which continues to this day. Over the years I have continued to work with the Engineering team to transform Wonder Workshop from a hardware company whose goal it was to sell robots to now being a subscription-based software company that sells robots as well as an educational platform that provides with educational materials and curriculum to help their students learn to code. The work that I've done on the backend systems migrating them from a Microservice architecture into a "Modular Monolith" has accelerated our ability add new functionality without compromising maintainability and scalability. Main programming language: ScalaFramework: Play FrameworkDatabase: Amazon DocumentDB (migrated from a self-hosted Mongo instance)Operating System: Ubuntu LinuxCloud: AWS * EC2 * ECS (both instance-based and Fargate) * Amazon DocumentDB

After nearly 2 years of contracting with Lynx Workflow on their flagship product, FactBox, I finally joined the team as the Chief Architect. Six years later in 2020 we were able to sell the company. FactBox is a SaaS platform for lawyers which helps them to manage the many small facts that they accumulate in the course of building up their cases. The facts may be organized and re-organized in every way, helping lawyers to build up timelines for their cases, to prepare for depositions, or to build just about any other type of report they like.FactBox was built using a mixture of Java and Scala with the Play Framework accessing a MongoDB instance on the backend, and AngularJS on the front. My responsibilities include design and development of our back-end systems as well as managing the operations of the production environment.Main programming languages: Java, ScalaFramework: Play FrameworkDatabase: MongoDB (running on dedicated EC2 instances)Operating System: Ubuntu LinuxDeployment: AWS * EC2 * CloudSearch * Route 53

I joined Iterable as a Software Engineer, designing and coding Scala-based services for the Iterable marketing automation platform. The very first thing I did when joining the company was to take on the task of creating architectural diagrams to describe Iterable's complex operating environment. These diagrams became valuable resources for getting new Engineers up to speed and for explaining our system to our largest customers. I also took on a mentoring role, helping the less experienced Engineers improve at their craft. The largest code project that I accomplished at Iterable was to upgrade their entire codebase to use what was then the most recent version of Play, a project whose final Git Pull Request touched over 400 files(!). With such a significant change, I also had to create a detailed deployment plan to insure that the upgrade was not going to disrupt our always-on services, and to have a fallback plan if unforeseen issues came up.Main programming language: ScalaFrameworks: Play FrameworkDatabase: Postgres, ElasticSearchOperating System: Ubuntu LinuxCloud: AWS * EC2 * EKS (Kubernetes)

Pirc.com was an online tool to help consumers find the best deals on household products in their area. By ingesting the weekly sales circulars at major nationwide retailers and matching those sales against coupon databases on the internet, we were able to create for each of our users a customized Personal Circular (which we called a Pircular) that would tell them where the best deals were on their favorite products.There were a few key innovations that were created to make this product a reality:* A Scala DSL to vastly simplify the process of crawling the web for sale information.* A customer built Solr tokenizer that knew how to tokenize the unstructured text of the sales and the coupons in such a way that would vastly simplify and increase the accuracy of the coupon+sale matching process.* A Akka actor-base platform for doing the weekly web crawling task, deployed on an auto-scaled cluster of EC2 instances running the ingest software.Main programming languages: Java, ScalaFrameworks: Play Framework, Akka ActorsDatabase: MongoDB, SolrOperating System: Ubuntu LinuxDeployment: AWS * EC2 * Route 53

I served as the lead architect for the Cisco Eos platform, the flagship product of the Cisco Media Solutions Group. Cisco Eos was a hosted Software as a Service platform that enabled Media and Entertainment companies to outsource many of the complexities and costs of their digital strategy, freeing up more of their time and resources to focus on their core business of finding and developing new talent and content. In my role as architect, I contributed to nearly all technical aspects of the Eos platform, from developing parts of the Java and PHP based application to creating productivity tools for the development environment to helping in Operations and database administration to formulating the long term vision for the platform.

As the Chief Architect at Tribe.net, I was responsible for coding all of the application layer for the initial product prototypes. In this function, I used many open source packages to speed up the time to delivery, and worked closely with our UI designer to get the prototype for the site up in about 6 weeks. 4 weeks later, and with the help of 2 more engineers, we put out our Beta release (in July 2003).Over the next 3.5 years I continued to play a pivotal role in the design and delivery of server side Java functionality. My favorite project was the design and implementation of Tribe.net's Open Profile system. This modular system allowed us to code very small pieces of standalone functionality called "plugins" that we were then able to drop into our application framework for inclusion on people's profiles and ultimately on their home pages as well.Tribe.net was ultimately purchased by Cisco in March 2007, and the software served as the starting point for what later became the Cisco Eos platform.

Independent contractor as a Software Engineer. Mobile Workforce is a small software company that is creating a PDA and Web based inventory management application for medical suppliers. The application is built on Java, Struts, and Tomcat. They used an eXtreme Programming methodology in which my role was the coding and testing of specific user design stories.

Branuity was an online brand management startup. The purpose of branuity.com was to bring to the web many brand management tools and resources that were typically only available through high priced management consulting firms. As the Lead Engineer and Architect, I was solely responsible for the creation of the web back end for the product, for creating the software development processes, for maintaining the development platform, and for keeping the development environments up and running. While at Branuity, I developed a web framework that enabled rapid development of new features and functionality for the branuity.com web site. This framework was later used to jump start the development of the tribe.net social network.

Quaartz Inc. was a dot-com era web calendaring company. As a Senior Engineer with Quaartz, I was instrumental in key elements of the design and implementation of the system. Of particular note was a small side project that I took on that ultimately freed the company from needing to purchase a $1,000,000 BroadVision license for web site personalization.

With BEA, my primary responsibility was to visit BEA customer sites and provide expert assistance in the implementation of BEA products. My main focus was in support of the Tuxedo middleware platform. Before there was Java, WebLogic, Tomcat, or any of the other application server technologies there was Tuxedo, which originated as a C-language based middleware platform created at Bell Labs in the 1980s. I first used Tuxedo while working with Andersen Consulting on the Walgreens project. I really came to enjoy working at the Middleware layer and took a job with BEA working solely on creating enterprise applications with our customers using Tuxedo as the platform.

Immediately after graduating from Northwestern University with an Electrical Engineering degree, I took a job with Andersen Consulting as a Staff Consultant and later, a Senior Consultant. I worked on two projects during my four years with the Firm:* Walgreens for 3.5 years, re-building their nationwide pharmacy network form the ground up using modern technologies to vastly reduce the hardware needs and physical footprint that the legacy mainframe and storage devices consumed at their data center.* FedEx for 6 months, modernizing the package tracking system.