John Kary Email & Phone Number

Kansas City, Missouri, United States

Writing software and directing backend, frontend, platform, architecture, and integrations at FlipperForce.com.Hiring and managing software engineering contractors.FlipperForce is a SaaS for house flippers and rehabbers to find deals, analyze deals, estimate rehab costs, and manage their real estate projects.FlipperForce is once again an independent product.

Working across Upright's Engineering, Technology, and Product departments, with focus in the Software Excellence group. Report to the CTO. No direct reports. Working on FlipperForce (Upright Tools) as needed.Engineering Strategy, Product-Engineering collaboration, and ensuring the organization is building the right things and building them well.Collaborate with CTO, Software Architects, Engineering Managers, Staff Engineers for successful Engineering practices.Highlights during this period:• Implement Product-Engineering operating model and software development lifecycle• Transition FlipperForce from using local accounts to Upright SSO (PKCE, OAuth, AWS Cognito), allowing Users to navigate seamlessly across all Upright services• Refactor FlipperForce codebase so data is "owned" by a Workspace entity instead of the Owner User• Implement Intercom chat support across all Upright tech stacks

Part Lead Engineer, part Engineering Manager. I hired 3 Engineers during this period to build more FlipperForce features. I accepted Engineering Management duties on top of Lead Software Engineer. Reported to Upright COO / President of FlipperForce.Leading strategy, architecture, security, infrastructure, testing and high quality standards of FlipperForce.Highlights during this period:• Hire and onboard 3 Engineers (Staff and Senior levels), conducting over 40 interviews• Management of direct reports: 1:1's, performance evaluations, compensation, professional development• Engineer 100% price increase for new and existing customers, increasing MRR 52% over 12 months• Optimize PHPUnit test suite with 2500 tests and 13,000 assertions to run in 2 minutes • Automate deployment using GitHub Actions across multi-tiered infrastructure (dev, staging, prod)• New Feature: Activity Log for Workspace members to see an activity feed across their Workspace• New Feature: Analytics tracking leading to insights like what percentage of Users used feature X before upgrading to a paid Subscription• Implement Playwright regression testing framework• Implement Request/Response API logging for third-party APIs using Guzzle PHP• Define Engineering department strategic initiatives, goals, KPIs, and metrics• Partner with Upright COO and Head of Product to set Product and Engineering roadmap for highest business impact• Completed SAVIA Leadership - Essential Skills For Managers training

Upright (previously Fund That Flip) is an end-to-end real estate investment platform offering passive real-estate investments and loans for residential real-estate flippers.I joined Upright as part of an acqui-hire of FlipperForce.com, a web-based platform for analyzing rehab deals and managing rehab projects. See my previous experience pre-acquisition.Lead Engineer building features and modernizing FlipperForce.

FlipperForce is a SaaS application (PHP, Laravel, VueJS) with tools to help house flippers estimate, plan, manage, and maximize profits of their residential rehab projects. The founder bootstrapped the application with several contractors before me, but had issues scaling performance and introducing new features.The founder leveraged me as a PHP expert and my background in house flipping to fix the application's performance issues, stabilize the codebase, and build new features to grow MRR.FlipperForce was acquired by Upright (previously Fund That Flip) in March 2022. I facilitated the technical transition, and eventually accepted a full-time position working for Upright to continue leading development on FlipperForce.Major contributions during this period:• Identify and fix countless security issues in code and servers• Upgrade Laravel from 5.8 to 8; Upgrade PHP from 7.2 to 8.1• Migrate 60GB of user-uploaded files from local server to Amazon S3 with no downtime• Implement white label support so large customers can re-brand FlipperForce to fully appear as their custom brand/service• Integrate Subscriptions to power the role-based access control features (RBAC)• Refine Repair Estimator UX and validation to prevent misuse and data integrity• New Feature: Collect and manage contractor Bids on Scope of Work• New Feature: File upload manager and photo preview• New Feature: Photo Log including EXIF reading to auto-detect date taken• Allow reusing previously uploaded files throughout the application• New Feature: Import Project Expenses from CSV and Excel• Create new reports visible in browser and downloadable as PDF and Word documents• Extract countless code from controllers and unit test it

Kansas City, Missouri, United States

The COVID-19 pandemic was an abrupt change for everyone, but also led to a career accomplishment.The pandemic halted almost all in-person research at Stowers for several weeks. But Stowers scientists designed a surveillance study to test for SARS-CoV-2 in its staff population, providing reasonable certainty for returning to in-person work.Stowers scientists repurposed on-premises equipment normally used for scientific research to test for SARS-CoV-2 virus in saliva instead of nasal swabs.I and two other Engineers were tasked with building custom software to conduct this study. All on-site staff would have saliva and blood tested several times per week. Our software was to facilitate specimen intake, compliance monitoring, analysis, and reporting. And a deadline of a few weeks.We worked quickly and tirelessly to build COVIDTrack: a web-based software for conducting the COVID-19 surveillance protocol designed by Stowers scientists. I demoed our kiosk intake and backend software to C-suite and study investigators.The source code was made open-source for others to adopt the protocol and facilitate their own return-to-work plan: https://github.com/stowersinstitute/COVIDTrack/graphs/contributorsSoftware features:• Support specimen anonymization at all steps for triple-blind adherence• Generate unique test tube barcodes on sticker sheets• A kiosk software for returning saliva and blood specimen by scanning test tube barcodes and answering a few questions• Intake and viability verification of returned specimens• Storage management to track where each specimen is stored• Ingesting a CSV file of qPCR and RT-PCR results from well plates and mapping results for each specimen• Highly confidential access to test results, limited to 2 individuals

Kansas City, Missouri, United States

After previously gaining the team's trust as a Tech Lead Consultant, my role shifted to leading small Product-focused teams building their business-critical software called LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System).LIMS is an end-to-end platform for investigative biomedical research from conception to publication. It allowed investigative scientists to organize and collaborate on their research, and request scientific services from world-class SMEs in the Institute's core services departments.I would regularly collaborate with world-class SME's to understand their scientific function and allow lab members to request service and receive results through LIMS.My work straddled between building reusable LIMS framework features with another Tech Lead, and leading small Product-focused development teams building Product-focused work. • Advance role-based access control (RBAC) using a mix of LDAP and local role management• Sample Management: sample tracking from origination to consumption, annotating Ontology metadata from Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry, aliquot and mother/daughter lineage, faceted search• Storage management, tracking Sample locations across specific freezers, racks, boxes, and well plates• Annotating and publishing raw scientific data (up to 1TB large) to a public Open Data Repository (ODR)• Proteomics analysis requests and analysis results• Microscopy asset management and time reservation with scheduling and calendaring• Inter-organization publication requests and journal publication tracking

Kansas City, Mo

Stowers sought my help to improve their 5-person Engineering team's productivity and modernize their 1 million-line legacy codebase (no framework PHP and JavaScript). The "team" could only assign 1 Engineer per project, released only once per month, was inundated with bugs due to manual testing and limited version control use.After 2 years of hard work and coaching, the team was releasing daily, writing automated testing to guard against regressions, using pre-merge Pull Requests to share knowledge, and championing a culture of high quality, knowledge sharing, and mentorship. My work eventually allowed the team to scale from 5 Engineers to 10 Engineers.• Establish a new development platform alongside their legacy system. REST API backend (PHP, Symfony 2) and JavaScript frontend (ExtJS).• Ongoing rolling replacement of old functionality with new functionality.• Migrate from SVN to git and train Engineers• Introduce and mentor Engineers in testing mindset, unit testing, functional testing, API testing using PHPUnit• Introduce pre-merge code reviews and establish a positive PR culture• Automate deployment instead of manually building releases• Automate dev environment provisioning on local machines• Automate provisioning environments for each git branch and PR (way before GitHub "Codespaces" was a thing)• Profiling PHP codebase for bottlenecks using Blackfire.io, Xdebug, XHProf• Add performance tracking and exception monitoring

Lawrence, Kansas, United States

Every year, almost 1,700 University of Kansas international students are required to pass the Applied English Center's English literacy coursework and classes every semester.AEC's office manager with 30-years experience was retiring soon. Everything flowed through her, creating immense operational and technical debt, including a legacy FoxPro database from the 1980s used for student PII, class scheduling, seating charts, proficiency testing, and advancement.A Business Analyst and I were contracted to decommission AEC's legacy FoxPro database and replace it with a custom web application:• Student intake and registration for 1700+ students per year• Integrate enterprise PeopleSoft / Oracle databases for student demographics and class schedule• Input and track student test scores across AEC classes• Support creating student seating charts• Support metrics and heuristics for anti-cheating• Build a proficiency-level recommendation engine based on student attendance, test scores, and department heuristics• Document web application usage and re-train staff to use the new software• Work closely with KU IT to ensure application met technical and security requirements

Lawrence, Kansas

Department expanded to 8 Engineers and 2 Student Engineers. I was the highest-ranking individual contributor and Tech Lead.My role continued focus on internal operations and leading complex custom web applications.Projects scaled from Engineers working solo to now collaborating in teams of 2 Engineers.During this time I also managed the 2 Student Engineers on the team.• Develop and maintain https://www.ku.edu homepage with millions of worldwide views per month.• Introduced unit testing on projects in practice and mentoring• Project: Establish on-prem static asset CDN serving 10 million requests per month.• Project: University of Kansas Athletics - Custom web app for 600+ student athletes a year to submit confidential PII and digitally sign NCAA compliance forms.• Project: Student Senate: Custom web app used by 28,000+ students to vote and elect Student Senate representatives. Keep voting anonymous for double-blind but prevent double voting.• Project: Hall Center for the Humanities - Grant application system with frontend for applicants to submit grant considerations, and backend for review committees to evaluate applicant materials• Lead transition from SVN to git, using locally-hosted git repos via SSH (pre-dating GitHub!)• Lead adoption of department's first ticketing system for (Mantis Bug Tracker)• Organized and delivered presentations at monthly campus-wide KU Web Developers meetings• Conduct security audit for apps developed across the University• Serve on interview committees across campus• Championed projects to have automated dev environment provisioning• Regular email, phone, message board support for other campus web developers during weekly support rotation• On-Call rotation with 24/7 availability for outages

Lawrence, Kansas, United States

Department expanded to 6 Engineers and 1 Student Engineer. Engineers would collaborate and share ideas but maintained working alone.My focus on quality and evolving practices pushed the team forward, establishing a foundation of collaboration, learning, and modernization.My manager calls me "the driving force of the team."• Lead adoption of automated deployment using Phing• Lead transition from CVS to SVN• Lead adoption of code review culture (admittedly it was those poor code-on-screen conference room reviews but it got us talking)• Project: Hall Center - Custom web app for calendar of events• Project: Hall Center for the Humanities - Events calendar with integration to homepage slideshow of events• Delivered presentations at monthly campus-wide KU Web Developers meetings• Regular email and phone support for other campus web developers during weekly support rotation• On-Call rotation with 24/7 availability for outages

Lawrence, Kansas, United States

Department expanded to 4 Engineers and 1 Student Engineer. Each Engineer worked solo on their own projects, operating like a consultancy to University departments.Each Engineer was responsible for requirements discovery, development, testing, deployment, and held accountable for deadlines.• Lead adoption of shared documentation, coding standards, reusable components• Lead adoption of first group chat for instant communication (IRC then AOL IM)• Project: School of Music - Custom web app powering digital signage• Establish support rotation for knowledge sharing

Lawrence, Kansas, United States

Hired as first student employee for a new central web development department within University of Kansas - Information Technology. Only other department members were a Director and a Senior Developer.Department supports https://www.ku.edu homepage, its supplemental pages, and about 50 University department websites.• Create content in pre-made website templates using custom HTML, CSS, and server-side includes (SSI)• Meet with department admin assistants and directors discussing needs for their website content• Project: KJHK - Custom website and design for student radio station• Project: KU Calendar maintenance built using PHP

Topeka, Kansas, United States

• Maintain CJOnline.com web pages and client sites using Dreamweaver 3 on Mac OS 9• Use Photoshop to manipulate and optimize images for web• Work independently during evening hours with minimal supervision