As the CTO at Journey Payroll & HR, I spearhead the development of innovative Payroll and HR software solutions designed to streamline and simplify how employees manage their payroll needs—from paystubs to taxes and direct deposits, HR and more. My focus is on enhancing user experience, ensuring that our products are not only functional but also intuitive and accessible. I lead a talented team of engineers, embracing REAL Agile methodologies and best practices gleaned over my lenghthy career to drive amazingly quick and solid development and to deliver top-tier software that makes a significant difference in the day-to-day lives of our users.

Ionzero provides expert consulting in the area of software development, including specialties in enterprise web application development and Internet Engineering. Our engineers provide expert know-how and guidance to companies wishing to develop top-quality software, web sites and services. As President and Lead Engineer, My responsibilities include not only development of new business and partnerships, but also hands-on technical analysis of existing systems and planned software development. I also have been known to get my hands dirty writing the top-notch code that Ionzero is known for.

As the Director of Engineering and Head of Enterprise systems, I am responsible for all operational aspects of the Clearbanc production and pre-production application and services, as well as the software delivery and quality assurance processes. When I joined Clearbanc, they were experiencing significant production failures on an almost daily basis. The teams had been without effective leadership for some time and morale was at an all time low. Within 8 weeks we had eliminated all of the previous recurring production failures, added significant and useful monitoring, and as a result had the smoothest Black Friday weekend in the company’s history. I also stabilized the team and focused on creating an environment where my engineers could do their best work.During that same time, and on an ongoing basis thereafter, I began a process of organizational debugging, searching for the issues that caused the failures the company was experiencing. Much of this could be attributed to lack of DevOps ownership, mistrust between teams and unnecessary gatekeeping / CYA behavior. I set about to dismantle that by getting teams more directly involved with each other and shifting the conversations from failure and blaming to constraints and solutions, with a focus on developing the teams ability to collaborate to create reasonable goals and expectations of their counterparts.Some highlights from this role: * Implemented incident response and post-mortem process for ongoing improvement and failure prevention. * Implemented operational insights program for effective alerting, monitoring and technical insight to our platfoorm. * Improved software delivery processes, going from multiple delivery failures weekly to multiple smooth software releases daily. * Improved security and resiliency by evaluating the cloud infrastructure and implementing a redeployment strategy that corrected multiple security vulnerabilities and network communication problems.

Supported and managed the Canonical / Ubuntu production environments. Provided support to external organizations, worked with multiple engineering teams on various production and pre-production initiatives. Managed and maintained Ubuntu archive servers - responsible for all upgrades and software installations on Ubuntu linux. This involved observing load patterns and creating / proposing improvements to the architecture for package distribution and serving process. At heavy load periods, such as after a new version of Ubuntu was released, our traffic could be above 100 Gigabit per second. If you have installed or updated an Ubuntu in the last 4 years, you pulled data from my servers.

As Director of Systems Engineering I was responsible for managing the development teams as well as the systems and network engineering team. In this position I worked with clients, vendors, and internal staff to accomplish the extremely aggressive goals of executive management. In a technical capacity, I redesigned their network to be more efficient and stable. I also designed their flagship web site publishing application, and led the development of the software up to the first public release.

Lead engineer at the Ticketmaster / Citysearch Chicago datacenter consisting of hundreds of Linux, Windows and Solaris servers running mod_perl applications, MySQL and Oracle.

At CAIS I built the Systems Engineering department from a one-man operation supporting 2500 dialup users to a 14-engineer team that managed several-hundred Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux and NT servers that supported over 80,000 dialup, DSL and high-speed internet users. In this position I was responsible for ensuring that all of the Internet services CAIS provided were available on a 24/7 zero-downtime basis. As part of CAIS’ push to become the largest provider of Internet service in hotels, executive management asked my department to develop a device to manage customer access and billing in these properties. On this project I used my advanced knowledge of software, TCP/IP networking protocols and UNIX internals to develop what we termed ‘universal network address translation’. We were the first company to develop this technology that allowed a laptop computer to get online via our network without modifying the system configuration, even if the laptop was manually configured for a different network. In addition to this breakthrough, we also developed software to manage and streamline the process of deploying and managing the physical network infrastructure on these properties. At CAIS I communicated with people of various backgrounds and levels of technical ability on a daily basis. I worked with executive management to transform the company’s goals into functioning products and services. Further, I presented numerous proposals, project status reports and departmental plans to executive management. I worked with the executives and technical staff of partner companies in a development and support capacity. I worked directly with our own engineers on maintenance and development, and teamed with engineers from companies such as Cisco, Nortel and Breezecom to address technical issues relating to their products. I dealt with escalated customer calls on a weekly basis and trained system engineering staff as well as support staff on technologies, systems and processes.