* Directed engineering of web app to operate the world's largest digital volunteer network, integrating and enhancing data streams from almost one hundred partner sources, enabling a unified real-time search experience across tens of thousands of daily volunteer opportunities.* Directed engineering of web app to operate family volunteering program for world-famous Fortune 100 entertainment company, enabling tens of thousands of organizations to mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers to perform millions of volunteer hours.* Directed engineering of web app to operate presidential volunteer program for Federal Government, fulfilling and delivering tens of thousands of orders for award products, comprising millions of dollars of sales.* Migrated .gov web app operated for Federal Government onto FedRAMP compliant AWS Serverless architecture in pursuit of FISMA Moderate accreditation.

My experience at Gather includes many adventures!* Managed during a two-year period of growth from four to 40 full-time employees, from one to five developers, from hundreds to thousands of paying customers, while reaching millions of dollars in ARR.* Designed developer hiring process for efficiency and consistency across candidates, evaluating soft-skills, hard-skills, and code skills.* Held weekly 1-on-1s, set quarterly objectives and key results, and performed quarterly reviews.* Coded synchronization with Google Calendar API including OAuth authentication, a proper asynchronous job queue for durability, and utilization of ACLs to share calendars amongst authorized users to minimize API calls.* Scaled to 7.5M API requests per week via Node.js powered back-end* Refactored web layer into a highly available and scalable Twelve-Factor app running on SalesForce’s Heroku platform with continuous delivery to staging, and up to several releases to production per day with zero-downtime including the ability to remove database instances from the cluster for maintenance.* Established AWS OpsWorks infrastructure built from code in a repeatable and scalable manner, with strategic placement in multiple AWS EC2 availability zones, featuring continuously replicated hot standbys, regular incremental snapshots, and regular full backups archived to S3, with an expected Recovery Point Objective of minutes or less.* Achieved PCI SAQ A-EP 3.1 compliance to enable collection of $1M in payments per week, including isolated environments with no commingling of client data, proper application of the principle of least privilege via AWS IAM, and encryption of data in-flight and at rest via AWS EBS.* Implemented data protection policy to safeguard personally identifiable information.* Amazon Web Services (AWS)* Angular* Automated deployment* Chef* Elasticsearch* Google Cloud Platform* New Relic* Node.js* NoSQL* PCI* PII* RethinkDB* Twelve-factor

* Executed conversion of codebase from free to paid subscription model* Implemented intelligent user flows to direct expired trial users to paid plans at the moment they attempted to access paid features* Integrated Stripe Subscriptions API to collect credit cards and initiate recurring payments* Ruby* Ruby on Rails* Backbone.js* PostgreSQL* Stripe API

I've worked on many apps in my career - many of them when I was a Nerd at the Big Nerd Ranch - where I loved helping my backend web team bring happiness to big and soon-to-be-big clients.Here are "Nerd of the Moment" awards I received from my co-workers - which I receive with pride and humility!"His approach to building what the client really needs, rather than what they want, while managing their expectations is an example of consulting done really, really well.""For being an excellent team manager. He's always looking out for his team and making sure they have everything they need. If he doesn't know the answer to a question, he makes sure to find out and pass along the info. He also makes sure that all of the backend/Ruby code reviews are getting done each week and he keeps us all on track.""Brandon is a great example of a team manager in the way that he looks out for the success of his team members and gives them the support they maybe didn't even know they needed.""Brandon's thoughtful, honest, kind responses to any and all questions makes him not just a joy to work with but also invaluable.""Giving sage advice about how to adjust development processes for clients who are sensitive to underdesigned stories being deployed to production.""For working with team members to help create a clear path for individual growth."

I consult independently when I'm not a full-time employee.I've been using Rails since before it was clear that Rails was a technology you could build a career upon!Fortunately things turned out well for Rails, because I sure do love Ruby.I'm no stranger to Node.js - and therefore JavaScript - either!I was around early enough to even score a commit - in C++!https://github.com/nodejs/node-v0.x-archive/commit/47fcf785ac1468744da55469bc78fbfd8628d9fb

I wrote software which crawled the 50 state tourism web sites and gathered a data warehouse of tourism points of interest.Then I wrote an app which allowed our employees to improve the data by locating the exact latitude and longitude of each point of interest on satellite imagery.We cold called Microsoft and flew to Redmond. They licensed the data for use in Streets and Trips, MapPoint and Virtual Earth - now called Bing Maps.With that income stream in place I sold my stake to an investor.