CoreTrust is a Blackstone-owned small company who specializes in cutting costs for large corporations and private equity groups. They maintain relationships with hundreds of vendors and suppliers and analyze the current spend of a prospective client to find ways to save them money through the direct relationship with the suppliers.Traditionally there was no engineering team at CoreTrust and as Blackstone invested in them a team was formed in late spring of 2023. I was hired as a full-stack contractor in the summer and converted to full-time in the fall. The work is a mix of NextJs, React, and Python technologies used in the public and member-facing applications. The public facing applications are SEO optimized React/NextJs sites with limited interactions with back-end services and an OpenAI based chatbot. The member-facing application is more complex, interacting with a relational database, data-charting, and back-end services running job queues, web scraping and balance sheet analysis.

Mersive created a hardware product (called Solstice) to handle video conferencing for many providers (Zoom, MS Teams, etc.). Software engineering is split between embedded systems programming on the Solstice "pods" and cloud based applications which manage configuration of the pods remotely.I was hired onto this small engineering team to serve as a technical lead for engineers working on services and apps for the Solstice pods. A suite of back-end microservices in several programming languages (NodeJs, Python Flask, Java Spring, and Rust) work together with embedded applications (C++ and Rust) running on the pods, communicating any file upload events, auth requests, or configuration changes in real time. The services, configuration management UI, and embedded apps integrate together to serve the video conferencing needs of our users.

My initial role at Haulynx was to create a bridge between backend services and their mobile, web, and data science teams. The web, mobile and data science teams needed a common interface to the ever-growing backend infrastructure. A current industry practice is to gather together numerous APIs into a single service (or gateway) which can be queried in a consistent and self-documenting manner.In this role I focused primarily on application engineering projects which were initiated by the cloud engineering team lead, as part of the team’s overall platform engineering goals. But I also assisted in the Kubernetes initiative, mainly on docker container best practices and infrastructure/pipeline engineering shell scripts.I joined Haulynx when they were a young startup and they were funded month-to-month by angel investors with everyone in their C-Suite under 25yrs old. It was exciting, we grew rapidly, were acquired by a major freight carrier - called US Express - and became their technology division.The road ended for Haulynx when US Express was acquired by a large competitor (Knight/Swift Transportation) and the product we created - to empower small/mid sized carriers to compete with large freight carriers - was ended, and the entire tech division (formerly Haulynx) all laid off at once. It's unfortunate that now our customers are right back where they started, trying to find a way to compete against big freight.

This was a senior engineer role on Carvana's architecture team and it was a mix of building “developer enablement” tooling, solutions architecture, and conducting training sessions for full-stack engineers.At the time React, Redux, Webpack and NodeJs were new to their engineering team and they were beginning to encounter scaling challenges. My primary focus was assisting or leading efforts to help train and build tooling to make their teams of engineers more successful in building and deploying front-end applications. I also had experience with several back-end and platform engineering technologies (Docker, NGINX, GraphQL) and was tasked with proving out those technology solutions.

Galaxy specializes in semiconductor testing and analytics software. Catching voltage problems and defects in silicon wafers early in the manufacturing process can save enormous amounts of money for semiconducting companies. The testing phase is a critical part of the wafer prototyping process, and both supercomputing testing hardware and software analytics tools are necessary investments.In this full-stack role I researched, prototyped and built microservices and rich UIs based on the product and technology requirements communicated to me by our VP of Engineering.Galaxy was acquired by Mentor Graphics, who was then acquired by Siemens a month later. I was originally brought on to help modernize, but this wasn’t of interest to the purchaser. Rather they were interested in our steady capital, consisting of a portfolio of semiconducting companies who were paying us for monthly subscriptions. Hiring reqs for our team were frozen and its work deprioritized.

A mix of (non-C2H) Contracting roles (Arizona DHS, Gannett, Blackboard, Choice Hotels).This period in the early 2010’s was the tail end of the phase where contracting roles were more like consulting. Nowadays, contracting is treated mostly as a probationary period for full-time hires and contract-to-hire is more common. The meaning of contracting seems to have changed and consulting has been rolled up into a handful of digital consulting agencies.Towards the end of this consulting/contracting phase I encountered two such projects in a row where I was part of a group of contractors who were brought on a year into past-due projects and the pace was exhausting. Because of this, I shifted out of contracting to try and find a small tech company.

CRC Information Systems specializes in software applications used in printing shops to handle the entirety of their business needs. Since the 1980’s they have built these modules which served around 150 different clients in the United States, Canada, and Central America.This role was my first full-time engineering role. I had been working on freelance web applications intermittently the previous 9 years and in the few years leading up to this role began to see signs that full-time software engineering roles may be opening up to web developers.In this role, SQL and .NET were both new to me, and my day-to-day duties had me working primarily in C#, Visual Basic, writing lots of SQL queries and Crystal Reports. After two years I was promoted and took on additional responsibility of mentoring junior developers and creating an internal wiki to consolidate the decades of print shop software knowledge scattered throughout internal reqs.After four years, I decided to move into a different type of software engineering. Most of the engineers who had mentored me had moved on, several into contracting/consulting roles. I felt I was ready as well and shifted into that type of work.