I help companies solve their challenging technical problems.

I continue to provide guidance to JBA Network on development, system, and business related decisions.

In early 2011, I was promoted to CTO. With this new title, I became heavily involved in the business decision making of the company, while continuing to oversee the system and software architecture.I lead the implementation of agile systems and processes.I architected the move to infrastructure as code, using Puppet and Ansible.I rearchitected the systems and DevOps process using the Atlassian stack, git, Docker, and various CI/CD tools.I redesigned the aging bulk email newsletter system with a microservice architecture using primarily Python. This system uses Redis, Rabbitmq, Celery, and Couchbase on the backend. The system is capable of customizing, sending, and tracking millions of emails per hour.I oversaw the development of a Node.js based reporting system capable of tracking 10s of millions of user interactions per hour that relied on MongoDB on the backend.Technology stack:PHPJQueryNode.jsPythonPerlCMySQLMongoDBCouchbaseRedisSolrPuppetAnsibleDocker SwarmUbuntu/Debian

Once the company's infrastructure was stable, I continued to manage the system engineering team. I was also able to dedicate more time to software development.During this period, I designed and implemented a media management system that was part of a reusable library of tools. It was used by various sites to manage, convert, encode, host, and provide ACLs for terabytes of multimedia assets hosted in our datacenter and AWS. This was written primarily in PHP with a Lighttpd plugin written in C. This system supported millions of reads per hour of images that could be customize at request time. It also supported encoding and streaming of video assets at various quality levels.I designed the infrastructure and assisted with the development of a horizontally scalable email sending system capable of customizing, sending, and tracking many millions of emails per day in C. This design depended heavily on a VMware infrastructure.I was lead of the development team for an event related social media website written in PHP/jQuery.

I was hired at JBA Network as a Software Developer. A few weeks after I was hired, power to a rack of servers in Atlanta was suddenly cut. When power was restored, most of the running systems were left in a broken state. The system engineeer who built the stack was on extended vacation abroad. No one else knew anything about the infrastructure. I spent the next week reverse engineering system configurations and bringing services back online.After the emergency, my job responsibilities shifted from development to a combination of development and system engineering. Over the next year I began rearchitecting the infrastructure to provide more redundancy and high availability.As the infrastructure grew, it became apparent that managing systems located over 4 hours away was impractical. I orchestrated the move to a local data center. The move provided an opportunity to complete the redesign of the infrastructure to achieve full redundancy and improve security.Once that infrastructure was stable, I redesigned and moved the rest of the companies infrastructure from various hosting providers into the local data center.When all was said and done, the combined infrastructure supported tens of thousands of users and tens of millions of hits per day for a dozen highly dynamic SAAS, music, and healing arts related social media sites. During this time, I also spearheaded the implementation of SVN for source control. I migrated our ticketing system from Trac to Redmine. I automated deployment processes and removed the development team’s access to production systems.

I helped the Aselo team refine and improve their IaC tooling to support multi-region deployments in AWS and management of many single tenant infrastructures via configuration driven patterns taking the time to deployment from days/weeks to hours.I successfully advocated for a move toward more modern react hook based patterns in the codebase to improve the maintainability and testability of the codebase.I guided the design and implementation of event driven pipelines using SQS and lambdas to handle processing chat transcript data.

I continue to support Verve Romance by serving as a technical advisor.

After a $1.5M Angel Round, I led the development and execution of an ambitious development roadmap that included rapid iterative expansion of features and a massive reduction of technical debt on a limited budget to maintain a reasonable runway.Some major initiatives during this time were other than major feature expansion were:• I led the move from the Atlassian stack to ClickUp/Github and was a driving force in the planning of processes for the product/development team to support growth. This included a move from Drone.io to github actions for the CI/CD pipeline.• We tackled the mountain of technical debt to significantly reduce development time. We reduced the code base by 50k lines of code in the first three months while simultaneously expanding the feature set of the application.•We added ecommerce using Shopify with unified navigation using Web Components before moving the commerce systems in app using the Shopify API.• I Turned the VueJS SPA into a PWA with browser notifications and replaced the native iOS and Android apps in mobile app stores by wrapping the PWA with Capacitor which enabled us to keep all versions of the app in sync on a limited budget.

After the departure of their founding CTO, I led the technology team at Book+Main while guiding the product team to move the technology stack forward in order to support a rapidly growing community. My team and I improved their software, processes, and infrastructure during an Angel round of funding while enabling it to support exponential growth on a shoestring budget.In addition to normal feature development and bug fixes, some major initiatives were:• I Implemented high volume user action tracking and user facing reporting using DynamoDB and Redis based Laravel queues for storage/retrieval.• I Migrate infrastructure and CI/CD from Elastic Beanstalk to EKS (Kubernetes) utilizing Drone CI for the CI/CD pipeline and Terraform for blue/green AWS infrastructure management.• We Implemented test coverage for API endpoints using PHPUnit and frontend code using jest and cypress. • We automated code standard compliance using ESLint, prettier, PhpCS, and SonarQube. • We performed a major overhaul of the application to improve code quality/modularity, remove the login wall, reduce registration flow complexity, and improve/standardize the major design elements of the front end.Technology stack:LaravelVue.js/VuexNodeRedisElasticSearchDynamoDBKubernetes (EKS)DockerTerraform

I guided Herrmann through the migration of their existing Docker based application stack from a managed hosting provider into AWS using Terraform and Ansible.Once the migration to AWS was complete, I re-architected their existing stack to run in Kubernetes using EKS, kops, Helm, Terraform, and Packer.I continued to provide guidance and assistance with updates to their DevOps systems and procedures.

My team augmented the Aardonyx team to support the rapid development of a customized subscription box application from the ground up using Next.js, React, PostgreSQL, and several third party APIs. The application included both a public facing ecommerce site and order customization system. It used Zoho Inventory integrations for inventory/fulfillment/tracking management and Stripe/TaxJar for payment and tax processing.Technology stack:React (Hooks/SWR)Node.jsNext.jsPostgres

I helped extend the life of NRC's legacy Code Ignitor codebase and Rackspace infrastructure.I designed and built a secure and scalable AWS infrastructure and CI/CD pipeline for NRC using Terraform, Packer, EC2/ASGs, Github Actions to support their laravel based replacement for the legacy stack.

I designed and built a secure and scalable AWS infrastructure and CI/CD pipeline for Mattress by Appointment using Terraform, Packer, Docker, Kubernetes (EKS), and Bitbucket Pipelines.

My brother and I founded Change Labs as an avenue for open source technological experimentation with an eye toward social change.Our experiments have included building a proof of concept React Native application related to fostering real human connection in day to day life, deep diving Blockstack application development, and other R&D related to Web3 technologies and small scale experimentation towards social change.Technology stack:React Native (Redux Saga)Express/Node.jsDynamoDBRedis

I continued to support BloomIP as a consultant after leaving to found Interrobang Consulting.

Improved and managed large scale production infrastructures in multiple AWS regions using Ansible and AWX.Redesigned management tools for an infrastructure in multiple IBM Cloud PODs with FortiGate firewalls using Ansible, AWX, and Puppet.Architected DevOps and CI/CD processes using Gitlab and Gitlab Runners with a local development environment using Vagrant and Ansible.

I designed, built, and maintained the internship application, interview, and placement system in Perl with a MySQL backend and the server infrastructure that ran it to allow multiple internship departments to manage applicants and schedule interviews.

I improved and maintained a CD/DVD inventory, pricing, listing, tracking and shipping software in Perl with a MySQL backend using the Amazon and Ebay APIs to sell thousands of units per month.

I designed, built, and maintained system used to collect and manage evidence and keep track of arrestees from release through trial for use during and after the protests surrounding the 2004 Republican National Convention using FileMaker Pro and Perl.