Chris Freel Email & Phone Number

I design and construct secure, reliable, performant software.With over 26 years of building software, I have experience in both conceptualising new ideas into finished products as well as jumping into large existing codebases to improve their scalability, reliability and usability.I am sometimes known as a problem-solver of last resort; that is, when no one else finds an answer, it will end up with me to see if I can pull another rabbit out of my hat. Sometimes I find a solution by looking at a problem from an unusual perspective, or by taking a ground-up, first principles approach (that may have something to do with many hours of toil over graduate physics problems).I still see a remarkably large amount of software that is at best described as mediocre; I believe we can do better. After understanding what the users of a software product care about, I develop a vision of what an idealised state of that product should be and work towards realising it.Some areas of particular focus for me over the years:APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT- Several times built applications from scratch, including gathering requirements directly from end users, designing, developing, testing, deploying and supporting. These included some custom features to improve UI/UX. Earlier examples were in C++ on Windows; more recent examples were using Spring Boot.- Mentored more junior engineers to help promote best practices / build their confidence through successes.TRICKY PROBLEMS- Identify and fix (in a few hours) a showstopper defect in a problem 3rd-party utility.- Resolve class library conflicts by debugging through decompiled libraries.- Hunt down mysterious concurrency bugs.- Rebuilt our entire development team, including helping to hire my own boss.PERFORMANCE- Changes to architecture, including reworking of an API to optimize user flow, redesign of data storage into more optimal formats, and adding appropriate multi-level caching (ThreadLocal, Guava/Caffeine, Redis) to improve response time by two orders of magnitude. - Database tuning to improve system throughput by 100x with SQL and ORM framework cleanup (Hibernate and MyBatis).- Code optimisations for a 95% reduction in processing some transactions.- Improve Java GC through tuning options, object pooling, and general object lifetime optizations.DEVOPS- Migrated numerous applications from costly proprietary approaches to free open-source alternatives, simultaneously containerizing them.- Created new CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins/Groovy)- Developed a cloud migration plan for a lift-and-shift to AWS

Listed skills include Xml, Software Development, Java, Hibernate, and 17 others.