Michael Bentz Email & Phone Number

Houston, Tx, Us

Huntington, New York, United States

Designed and developed a multi-tenant call center web-based CRM application capable of facilitating both inbound and outbound calls, leveraging Twilio's programmable voice API with PHP/Laravel. Designed and developed a comprehensive solution that seamlessly connected search engine advertisement clicks to inbound customer calls, adding tremendous value to our client's operations, enabling them to identify and grow successful SEO campaigns.Inherited a mission-critical production application written in PHP/Laravel that was hastily developed and intricately interconnected with legacy systems. Quickly acquired in-depth comprehension of the application, provided proficient support and implemented strategic enhancements to improve its overall stability.

Houston, Texas, United States

Directed a team of highly skilled engineers responsible for the uptime and ongoing support of the technical infrastructure that powered the core platform for all Hearst Newspaper websites (sfgate.com, chron.com, mysa.com, timesunion.com, seattlepi.com, newstimes.com, and many more).Managed large projects from conception to completion, including a full datacenter migration, CDN provider migration, Disaster Recovery solution, server maintenance upgrades, regular application server builds, andacquisition migrations.Developed an emergency support communication and incident reporting application using PHP/Laravel that leveraged Twilio’s programmable voice API to accept incoming calls, page engineers via phone calls and SMS notifications, and posted recorded voice messages to Slack.Saved Hearst over $100,000 annually on hosting costs by splitting production and staging/qc hosting between multiple hosting providers, including AWS cloud-based solutions, which ultimately enabled us to leverage it as a Disaster Recovery solution at no additional cost.

Houston, Texas, United States

Managed a team of highly skilled engineers responsible for the uptime and ongoing support of the technical infrastructure that powered the core platform for all Hearst Newspaper websites (sfgate.com, chron.com, mysa.com, timesunion.com, seattlepi.com, newstimes.com, and many more).Managed large projects from conception to completion, including a full datacenter migration, CDN provider migration, Disaster Recovery solution, server maintenance upgrades, regular application server builds, andacquisition migrations.Developed an emergency support communication and incident reporting application using PHP/Laravel that leveraged Twilio’s programmable voice API to accept incoming calls, page engineers via phone calls and SMS notifications, and posted recorded voice messages to Slack.Saved Hearst over $100,000 annually on hosting costs by splitting production and staging/qc hosting between multiple hosting providers, including AWS cloud-based solutions, which ultimately enabled us to leverage it as a Disaster Recovery solution at no additional cost.

Houston, Texas Area

Pitched the idea for this role and was promoted into it. Bridged all gaps between development, QA/QC, and project management to ensure the release remained on schedule at all times. Created a risk management process to manage riskier code changes.Created a new code building and deployment process that cut our bi-weekly code deployment times from 3-5 hours to roughly 30 minutes. It also greatly reduced the risk of these deployments. Eventually, this new process helped us to achieve daily deployments.Developed a code merging tool using PHP and GIT to connect the dots between code commits and support tickets. It enabled us to quickly identify which tickets had code in a release and which were still outstanding.

Houston, Texas Area

Lead developer of a 6 member Agile Development team that enhanced and debugged the custom core CMS (used by all Hearst Newspapers websites) built using PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML/CSS.

Houston, Tx

Brought in to rescue and untangle a legacy newspaper classified ads (verticals) feed system primarily consisting of PERL scripts generating XML files delivered via FTP. Breathed new life into the classifieds feed system by refactoring all the PERL scripts, overhauling the MySQL database and refactoring all SQL queries for efficiency, and meeting with vendors to simplify and update old processes.Regularly assisted with chron.com feature development. We later migrated this site to the core CMS platform mentioned above.

Lodi, California, United States

Designed and developed intranet and web-based applications including automotive inventory control and reporting tools, the Geweke RV website, and the Geweke Suzuki Automotive websites. Bridged the gab between IT and Advertising departments.