John Platte Email & Phone Number

Helping owners of bootstrapped businesses make their businesses work independently. Too many small businesses are held back because everything is going through a key person, or similar issues. Through my own experience as a business owner, software lead, and consultant in companies of many sizes, I know how to identify and fix the problems that can keep staff stuck.

Ithaca, New York, Us

Beginning the first day, immediately designed and implemented Postmates and DoorDash grocery delivery.Designed and helped implement online SNAP shopping using event sourcing. This innovative step allowed the team to develop very complex, sensitive, and heavily-regulated logic with great efficiency, beating competitors such as Kroger to market.Introduced Component-Based Rails Application architecture, allowing the team to break down the monolithic application into separate modules with clear boundaries. This allowed speedy “greenfield” development of features that otherwise would have been burdened with the weight of coupling with legacy features.Introduced clear API contracts for the complex loyalty infrastructure that handles shopper perks and rewards cards, allowing new loyalty technologies to be added quickly and with minimum technical risk. Introduced type-checked immutable values in many areas, solving several expensive problems stemming from the use of freeform hashes.During entire tenure, was constantly the point person tasked with designing and pioneering the most business-critical new features so that the technical risks would be minimized by design. Relentlessly worked on technical debt bottlenecks, including areas at the heart of the system that had become very complex.Trained and coached other team members. One example was an impromptu session on an estimation framework that dramatically helped the management of a major project teammates were working on.Assisted in many upgrades of application code, dependencies, and infrastructure. Produced numerous key integrations. Was often the team member to turn casual remarks into tickets that got implemented and shipped.

San Diego, Ca, Us

Designed and implemented strategies and tools for scaling this Ruby-based software-with-a-service business with its new owners.

Brought my skills to this great nonprofit’s online presence and technical needs. Migrated email hosting. Led an effort to clarify navigation and user experience. Created tooling to simplify back-office data processing and posting. Created a React+Redux media library application that opened years of archives to members in an easy-to-use format.

Syosset, Ny, Us

Responsible for the performance, security and availability of this well-trafficked website. Serve as technical liaison to stakeholders, staff, and other users.Led the technical team in a major refresh of a prominent website. Brought performance from unacceptable to delightful speeds with 5.7-second improvement. Set up Varnish caching for further performance boost, decreased system load, and fault tolerance.Led further design refresh and carried out software development and front-end work.

Small family farm and homestead. We grew mixed vegetables for local subscribers, markets, restaurants, and health food stores.

Developing and tuning web applications with startups and small- and medium-sized businesses. Took 12 seconds off the delay for a retailer’s menu bar to appear on screen while boosting overall site performance. Project completed on tight budget.Improved application performance throughout the stack—database calls, application code, and client-side factors—for a hosted service that supports Fortune 500 clients. Developed many new features and maintained and improved legacy code while advising staff on architectural and process decisions.Delivered and integrated custom live chat functionality for a Rails-based private social network used for market research. Performance and scalability were exceptional.Some of the many technologies used include Ruby on Rails, web performance optimization, nginx, jQuery, Java, ColdFusion, and Unix system administration.

Developed features, architecture, and strategy for the exciting product startup team that now makes Churn Buster. I introduced React, component-based Rails architecture, and domain-driven design.

Client purchased a solid business running on very shaky code. Upgraded this growing Rails application to handle its increasing scale. Deployed Sidekiq background processing and a caching layer. Moved heaviest data crunching to the background and reworked front end to load the results asynchronously. Cleaned up code base, removing risky duplication and refactoring toward a clear domain model and publish/subscribe events to reduce coupling. Implemented expert database tuning recommendations to keep service available prior to planned rewrite.

Los Gatos, California, Us

Rearchitected and reworked legacy code in several key areas related to product flexibility and pricing, making key business objectives possible.Added elegant publish/subscribe mechanism to decouple separate business processes. Testability and cohesion improved with reduced reliance on enormous do-everything classes.Created PubSub-based notifications for updates to thousands of users, obeying complex conditions.Addressed numerous performance and concurrency database issues, including work with Sidekiq background jobs and emergency response.

Addison, Il, Us

Worked on a 15-member agile team building and maintaining a Java web application with heterogenous architecture and several kinds of external interfaces. Trained staff in applying agile and object-oriented design practices. Performed an emergency rewrite of JCE cryptography code to use BouncyCastle lightweight APIs. Identified the issue, researched and tested the fix, and delivered sooner than expected, permitting a very visible release to proceed on time.Integrated driving-directions information from the Google Maps API into a complex geographic selection algorithm for this major direct-selling firm. Test-drove JavaScript object design for successful reuse in many localities and pages with varying business rules.

Chicago, Il, Us

I pioneered this consulting company’s transition from a Java-only shop to a leading Rails shop. It was later purchased by its client Groupon.Many of the projects (see separate entries) were high-profile, receiving attention from top executives at the respective clients.Led development on a social networking website for a national entertainment brand. In addition to core development tasks, provided advice and solutions for preparing a high-traffic launch. Client expressed delight with results.A few technologies used heavily: JRuby, Ajax, Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, and Capistrano.

Chicago, Il, Us

Guided a large development team through the first-ever integration of a Rails app into an existing Java-stack app. Delivered several significant new features while encountering many novel design, implementation, and methodology challenges arising from the effort.Evangelized practices to help this energetic, skilled team keep improving its quality and consistency. Recommended specific process changes that had immediate positive effect on team deliveries.

Provided strategic and development assistance on a new effort to create internal tools rapidly using Ruby on Rails backed by Oracle databases.Maintained a Rails plugin to provide a common authentication and authorization scheme. Designed and developed a single sign-on integration with the Windows domain.Delivered three separate Rails apps for three different types of audiences and usage patterns within the firm, two of them with top executives as stakeholders.

Hampton, Virginia, Us

Short but intense visit helping aerodynamicists, well-versed in Ruby, create their first Ruby on Rails project for sharing re-entry air stream data with each other.It was fascinating because it was the reverse of many Rails situations: the Ruby part was old hat, but SQL, UI programming, and layered architecture were new.That and the whole spaceship angle.

Opt-in email marketing provider for Fortune 500 companies.Provided new perspectives and evangelized good practices for a team struggling with a codebase that had begun years ago as a prototype. Created an elegant Ruby + XML tool for specifying and rendering email designs that removed a major pain point.Proposed, initiated, and guided an effort to migrate backend code to Java from ColdFusion.

Portland, Oregon, Us

Developed features for Java WebObjects applications. Integrated JUnit into the XCode build process and evangelized and demonstrated its use.

Ruby pioneer Nathaniel Talbott and his team had brought Ruby in to implement a registration app at this organization before Rails existed. I worked with John Long and his team to integrate the not-yet-released Rails framework with their existing model code.I later had the opportunity to share an experience report with Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, who was intrigued that an existing (non-ActiveRecord) Ruby model layer could integrate with Rails so smoothly.

A wide range of development and Linux administration tasks.Prototyped a GUI medical-records application using Ruby.Helped an ISP organize and standardize its Apache shared-hosting environment.

Hired as an audio tech, I also immediately put my graphic design and temporal composition skills to use in video post-production in Adobe After Effects.I then moved across the street to become a web developer, beginning my software career in earnest. I taught myself object-oriented design, test-driven development, and Extreme Programming practices while on that project.

Implemented a ritzy graphic system to help a dot-com startup sell to venture capitalists. Also conducted some market research and strategy planning.I was the sole employee, and was laid off when venture capital ran dry.

Upland, In, Us

Initial assignment was maintenance of content on online course catalog. Upon observing the hodgepodge of spreadsheets being used to manage the course development process, suggested and delivered a Microsoft Access-based application that has seen long use.