Loren Norman Email & Phone Number

Grand Rapids, Mi, Us

Paperize is a tabletop game design tool that I created to bring modern agile project management practices to the tabletop game industry. It helps game designers go from idea to playable prototype in minimum time so that more games get tested, games get tested more, and the quantity of quality games goes up over time. Make better games, faster!Paperize is also an open source project with some lofty goals:- free for end users- no server- no ads- no surveillance- radical scalePaperize is a Vue app written in modern Javascript entirely running in-browser, deployed to a global CDN, with unit and integration tests, that has been (thus far) written entirely by me.

Atlanta, Ga

I am a founding partner of an Atlanta-based investment club. The club's mission is “Empowering personal wealth through group education.” We invest in stocks, commodities, real estate, and P2P lending, as well as holding events and making charitable donations annually. As president, it was my job to coordinate the efforts of the membership, including executing business at monthly meetings, planning events and retreats, and organizing and empowering committees to act on behalf of the club.For me, this club is all about soft skills: consensus building, leadership, exposure to non-tech fields, philanthropy, etc. Financial literacy is a nice bonus.

Greater Atlanta Area

As the engineering team coach at Polar Notion, I brought 20 years of web development experience to every step of the consulting process. Some of the high points:- pair programming as much as possible- friendly, learning-focused code reviews for every Pull Request- lunch & learn topics of a wide variety, both planned and ad-hoc- stand-ups/weekly status meetings- weekly one-on-one meetings (the key to a healthy, human-centric business!)- architecture/database planning meetings- client communications ("always be managing expectations")

Greater Atlanta Area

Built out the entire cloud product offering backend using ExpressJS, Postgres, AWS & Google Cloud, RabbitMQ, and of course, lots of tests!

Atlanta, Ga

As TourBuzz has grown, its team has remained small and cross-functional, so I've had numerous responsibilities in my time there:- Product Engineer: investigating and prototyping a new version of the product that targets real estate agents directly instead of the photographers that work with them, Team Lead for a small team creating a modern stack with a Gulp/Angular SPA on the front and Rails API in the back- Sales Engineer: when a major competitor unexpectedly went belly-up, we reacted by making sure their largest and most important clients had a safe place to land, with me as the primary point of contact. I collaborated with high value customers directly, discovering their needs that we didn't have answers for, and quickly built prototype solutions that were "good enough", resulting in a 25% increase in top-line revenue.- DevOps: tuning an image resizing job queue for stability and porting a video generation job to EC2/LC/ASG using Ansible, resulting in cheaper bills and dramatically less developer interruptions. I was later instrumental in creating and filling a full time devops role to take it over.

Atlanta, Ga

I spent some time at the ubiquitous and enigmatic GitHub, learning about and absorbing their "open allocation" culture and processes from the inside. I worked on an internal tool for the company that every employee and founder used on an at-least-weekly basis.GitHub famously "builds web apps like it's 2005", meaning server-generated templates and gradual enhancement via JavaScript, with a minimum of cleverness and lots of caching for performance and scale.Using GitHub for software development is second nature now: - We used Issues to discuss and organize our work. - Created Pull Requests early and often in order to get more eyes on in-development code as soon as possible (yes, even code that SHOULDN'T get merged.) - Let the CI server run all the tests (no need to do it locally.) - Practiced "It's not done until it's fast", even for internal products. - The team is more than 60% remote, making a unique environment of the best minds regardless of geography.

Atlanta, Ga

I joined MailChimp to help take their thriving newsletter-based business into the transactional email realm, competing with the likes of SendGrid and MailGun. Their engineering team was already intact, but they needed a developer who could talk to developers, so I joined up and hit the conference trail.- traveled and sponsored conferences, meetups and hackathons, to build awareness of the Mandrill product - collaborated with other companies to integrate with their platforms and technologies- wrote blog posts about cool, possibly unexpected things that could be done with Mandrill, like integrating with Wordpress or tracking "opens" for personal email - worked with support to help with large clients and difficult integrations

Atlanta, Ga

I was the first technical hire at Scoutmob, meaning I inherited a codebase built by contractors as well as all of the other technical needs of a growing company, including but not limited to the printers, wifi, and VOIP system for the inside sales team. Not entirely what I expected, but that's the small startup life!- only developer working closely with the CEO, COO, art director, and copywriters to rapidly iterate a beautiful product - scaled the service from 3 to 13 cities without any expansion of the development team- grew email list management from tens of thousands to over ten million in under 2 years - helped the company pivot by launching an e-commerce service, including customizing an e-commerce platform, integrating a payment processor, and building tools and processes for running and fulfilling the store - hired a team to replace myself for a smooth transition when it was time to leave

Developer for hire with diverse range of skills including Ruby/Rails, Flash/Flex, cloud computing (Amazon S3, EC2, etc). Specializing in taking an idea from concept to deployment on budget and on time.

2D/3D programming in Flex/Actionscript for the creation of an in-house panorama viewer for real estate photographers. This piece of software pushes the envelope for the industry by creating a single, seamless interface that integrates still images, partial and 360-degree panoramas, soundtracks and voice-overs, floor plans, and even videos for an experience that "wows" home-buyers across the web like never before.

Highgroove Studios is one of the foremost Ruby on Rails consultancies, with such high-profile customers as UC Berkeley, Sun Microsystems, the State of Georgia, and The New York Times.The volume, diversity, and speedy turnaround time of Highgroove projects means that I get to work on something new almost every week. We use an agile, iterative approach to development, so we are able to deliver chunks of real business value to our customers at regular, and often short, intervals.Sometimes I will jump into a project that is already underway and add some new features or fix some bugs. Other times, I may be called on to provision servers and deploy a brand new web app from scratch for a customer. Highgroove moves through projects at a screaming pace that I find is well-suited to my skills and talents.

VideoCrush.com was to be the world's first video-only web dating platform. I implemented a seamless, easy to use video conversation system that required no tedious setup or up-front download for the user. All user behaviors were tracked to give automatic feedback which helped evolve the application's usability and user experience at speed. Though this project never launched, a working proof-of-concept was created and beta-tested that combined multiple technologies: a Ruby on Rails backend, a Flash/Flex video-recorder and playback application, and the entire system was built on Amazon's EC2 and S3 technologies for instant (and infinite) scalability.

Responsible for all things technology in this bleeding-edge, swing-for-the-fences web marketing startup. Using Ruby on Rails, I developed and deployed more than a dozen different web applications to support our products and services, many of them profitable in as little as two weeks. The Rails framework itself evolved greatly during this time-frame, as well, and maintaining so many web apps through this transition has afforded me a much deeper understanding of the framework.

Worked on a small development team (4) to launch the first multiplayer management simulation game for mobile on Cingular (now AT&T) in October 2005.Participated in game design and technical design meetings, helped steer strategic business decisions and tactical development decisions.Developed code to seamlessly build our mobile products for a wide variety of devices. Mobile devices had radically disparate capabilities and specifications, making rich application development a particular problem, especially for a small team. We turned this hurdle into an opportunity.Built a graphics pipeline to support versioned, device-specific sprite sheets from the graphic designer. Being rich applications, our products were very heavy on graphics, so process was important.Worked with the 3d developer to create a 2d port of the game with minimal degradation to the user experience.Built infrastructure for quickly creating and updating graphical user interface elements, like menu screens, buttons, links, etc.

Founded Tapscore Mobile to create branded gaming experiences for mass-market mobile devices.Led a team of 3 to design, architect and deliver a rich, original gaming experience in 4 months.Worked with a graphic designer to create sprite sheets to make the most efficient use of the limited resources of the device.Created standalone, level-editor software that seamlessly integrated with the game, offloading more creative work from the programmers to the team members with idle time.Ported and tested the product on multiple devices with varying capabilities and processing power.Helped create business plans and documentation to facilitate raising investment capital.Successfully merged with Escapepod, LLC in August 2004.

Education record

High School Diploma