Rejoined Expedia on a 6 month contract to assist with project to unify Vrbo pricing systems with Expedia's lodging pricing systems, in an effort to reduce code duplication, increase development speed, and allow easier integration of vacation rental inventory in various sales channels. My primary responsibilities were advising on the data transformations and systems design, and resolving issues with early versions of the integration.

I joined as a Senior Engineer and was promoted twice, to Principal Engineer, with responsibility for training and leading a team, as well as providing both architectural direction and in-depth coding and debugging. My main focus was design, development, and maintenance of the pricing platform which calculated rent, taxes and commissions for vacation rental stays. Supporting pricing calculations for all use cases, including high-volume users like search and filtering, required performance of 600k quotes/second with <1 ms/quote latency. We were able to meet this consistently through significant pre-computation, scatter-gather based architecture and careful attention to runtime efficiency. We also designed and built a companion data ingestion system which pre-filtered and combined sixteen separate streams of internal data from Kafka, RabbitMQ and REST APIs required to calculate prices. Initially developed as an on-premise C#-based application, over the years we rebuilt it into a hybrid-cloud deployment hosted in AWS, and eventually into a pure-cloud application based around AWS managed services.

I was hired to develop enterprise-grade data sharing APIs for a consumer price company. Unbeknownst to me the company was in financial trouble before I joined, and stopped paying employees within eight weeks. I left shortly after. I have no idea why they were hiring with an empty bank account.

I worked as part of a six-person startup team working on a green-field messaging service, similar to WhatsApp or Signal. I designed and developed the cloud-native backend platform on Microsoft Azure, including data storage, REST APIs, email & push notification systems, and observability. I also developed the Javascript-based single-page web client.

Created and/or maintained a range of server and web applications, including NewsGator Widgets, NewsGator Velocity, the Glassboard platform and web client, the NewsGator RSS syndication engine. Continued as a contractor to maintain several systems that continued to operate and produce revenue for years after active development ceased. Worked extensively in C#, IIS, Javascript and the Azure cloud computing platform.

I worked as a contractor to replace a mainframe-based call center application with a flexible web-based solution. We delivered a solution which reduced operation latency substantially, while using less than 10% as much hardware.

I began as a Software Development Intern and, over four years, progressed to Lead Developer heading a team of four contractors. I worked on a variety of web-based applications including trouble ticketing and resolution and customer-facing management portals.

Phone and in-person desktop support. It was a good learning experience in handling irate users, eliciting good descriptions of problems, and understanding how software can be misused and instructions can be misread. I also learned firsthand why one should never assume that the user has plugged in their computer before trying to use it.