- Architecture on project to build a new full featured service oriented backend for an advanced learning management system- Led efforts to modernize and migrate legacy product into the DoD cloud on SecondFront with PlatformOne- Team leadership: Optimized team scrum agile methods and coached team members to build a strong and healthy team that consistently produced strong value each and every sprint.

Senior software engineer and leader within the backend development team specializing in supporting overall systems infrastructure (devops, tooling, APIs, microservices, etc). Leading, mentoring and coordinating development across cross-speciality teams, advocating for quality development practices that embrace automated testing, continuous improvement, and advocating for strong object oriented best practices across the development teams.Built an advanced A/B Testing microservice utilizing the Symfony API-Platform framework, providing tracking of identities associated with specific test variants. The microservice also provides a feature flag microservice to enable the ability to parameterize logic throughout the application.

Worked within the software development team to build high quality software that powering Built's platform. Focused primarily on test automation and backend api development using LAMP stack technologies, utilizing code ignitor and proprietary frameworks. Worked with other developers to mentor and grow their skills across the technology stack. At present responsible as a team lead handling deployments, mentoring, escalation resolution, and code improvement projects.

Managed multiple development teams with up to 12 developers (direct reports). Worked with development team to optimize scrum development process to more effectively meet deadlines and reduce general chaos. Taught team collaboration skills, solutions engineering, three amigos techniques, automated testing techniques, and development process improvement in the organization. Focused on motivating team to embrace higher quality code standards, and developing a longer term perspective on building highly maintainable, testable and effective code. Worked remote in Nashville, TN.Research and prototyping projects such as challenges associated with upgrading PHP to version 7 within a monolithic legacy codebase that used deprecated PHP features.Worked with development scrum teams to successfully define multiple project requirements and to guide technical direction for the team and often across multiple development teams.Improved code review process transparency and visibility through use of third party code review toolsWorked with teams to develop coding standards across the organization, improve general skill level, mentoring and training in successful code development strategies.Trained and coached multiple teams on using a more rigorous backlog grooming process and using solutions engineering. The development teams experienced immediate improvements reducing unnecessary churn and improved completion rate for their committed stories.Ran numerous small experiments with each of my development teams to improve development process and code quality (solutions engineering, developing positive team habits, test driven development, using named branches, collaboration within online chat rooms, coding standards, qa collaboration, user story kickoff meetings).

Kaplan University School of Professional and Continuing Education (KU-PACE) specializes in the not-for-credit certification programs that are offered by Kaplan University. With over 20 different product lines, KU-PACE assists students in obtaining certificates in a number of different industries, from the financial to real estate to stock markets. Primarily remote for this role.On one projects, developed a full project plan and architecture from product owner documentation and interviews, managed a team of Python developers to develop an application from the ground up on Google App Engine which made extensive use of message queues to enhance application resilience and reliability where points of failure and lack of redundancies existed within the system.Coached and developed a very effective agile scrum XP team of remote and local developers using tools such as TeamSpeak (voice and text chat) with join.me (Screen sharing) to facilitate effective pair programming and test driven development process. Implementing improved development process using TDD and Pair programming in the place of the normal waterfall style individual developer followed by code review type of process. The results: improved throughput and performance, less bugs and better code in spite of many new developers on the team.Continued responsibilities as primary architect of the KUPACE LMS project, solving the most difficult technical challenges and suggesting the best approaches to create a platform that will be able to scale and handle not just the problem at hand but also other challenges that the platform is likely to face in the future with new product lines.Primary responsibility for translating business requirements into actionable BDD “user stories” and technical documents for developers across multiple platforms.

Coached and developed a very effective agile scrum XP team of remote and local developers using tools such as TeamSpeak (voice and text chat) with join.me (Screen sharing) to facilitate effective pair programming and test driven development process. Implementing improved development process that uses TDD and Pair programming in the place of the normal waterfall style individual developer followed by code review type of process. The results: improved throughput and performance, less bugs and better code in spite of many new developers on the team.Quick ramp up of a team (adding 10+ developers) within a short period of time while maintaining effective quality standards.Training of many developers within the code base, our development process, scrum and unit testing, mentoring them to become effective contributors as quickly as possible.Continued responsibilities as primary architect of the KUPACE LMS project, solving the most difficult technical challenges and suggesting the best approaches to create a platform that will be able to scale and handle not just the problem at hand but also other challenges that the platform is likely to face in the future with new product lines.

Kaplan Professional (Kaplan Education and Kaplan Schweser) is a very successful and quickly growing branch of the Kaplan family. Focused on helping professionals obtain the accreditation they need, Kaplan Schweser offers test preparation services for top accreditations includinc CPA and CFA.Accomplishments:Refactored many subsystems by breaking rules and logic out of the code base and making the system more flexible and less fragile. Worked on solving many complex and difficult problems in an aging code base under aggressive deadlines and pressure.Responsible for the object oriented architecture of a heavily tested world-class level KUPACE LMS platform to drive regulated education across all of our product lines. Worked with a great team to build out major components of this platform over a 2+ year period of time in a incremental development style that emphasized automated testing at every level (unit, integration, user acceptance, system). Key player in development of an elearning platform was using a number of technologies including Zend Framework, Kohana, Memcached, Apache, PHP 5.3, PhpUnit, Behat/Mink, Selenium, Jenkins, Ant, MySQL NDB Cluster, REST, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery, and Smarty.

Developing web applications for the Care2.com redesign projects, architectural improvements for website scalability such as a unique store and forward system. Heavily involved in the eCards and GreenLiving site redesigns (backend php coding) and wordpress integration with the Care2 website.

First developer for small start up company which bootstrapped its way from zero to over a million in revenue over the period of 8 years. Worked primarily to scale the site as a combination sysadmin, php engineer, and business marketing strategist. Solved many internal backend problems (inventory management, employee efficiency) and website usability issues, unique features and begun the site's switchover to a web 2.0 platform using AJAX technologies for such things as "add to cart" and the one-page checkout system. See: http://www.acherryontop.com and http://www.stickersgalore.com.