Alex Tharp Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Helping build the future of Second Life!

Atlanta, Georgia, Us

Atlanta, Georgia, Us

Remote, Ca

Worked with a small team to build out and support the Dribbble experience. Built numerous core platform and talent recruitment features using Rails, Vue, Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL. Acted as on-call engineer, becoming intimately familiar with the large, legacy Rails application. Focused on improving existing code, mentoring and pairing with other engineers, and working closely with the product team to improve our large suite of products.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Formed and led team to create a new, open source CMS designed to be configurable, extensible, multitenant, modular and plugins-based, while still being backed by modern technologies: Rails, React, GraphQL, Elasticsearch, Redis and PostgreSQL's JSONB functionality.In Cortex CMS, "Content Types" can be constructed by pulling in plugin-based "Fields" to serve ever-evolving needs across the organization, similar to Drupal (for more information, see https://docs.cortexcms.org/core-concepts). Both plugins and the core applicaton feature a robust service/transaction layer built with dry-rb, advanced WYSIWYG widget system, granular, on-the-fly configurable role/permission system, React-based UIs and a publishing/scheduling system. I was responsible for architecting most features and leading/mentoring a team of engineers to build out the majority of the platform within a year. Assisted and encouraged teammembers to contribute architecture plans. Created and authored Documentaton Portal. Led initiative and created business plan to open source applicaton. For further platform rationale, please see the documentation: https://docs.cortexcms.org/motivationSimultaneously, my team was also responsible for building an entirely new employer-focused marketing application using Rails/React, using Cortex CMS's Webpage builder/API as its data source. This contributed directly to increased sales and brand-new, self-service subscription-based sales models. (see: https://hiring.careerbuilder.com/)During this time, I also took over the brownfield .NET/C# eCommerce/Shopping Cart platform & team, leading the initiative to rebuild it with Rails/React and off-the-shelf components, while still integrating fully with company's backoffice platform.Managed DevOps process and platform, building Docker scripts for our major applications. Constantly re-evaluated platform/SEO performance using New Relic and Sentry, providing suggestions and new user stories for its improvement.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Created foundational architecture and features for Legacy Cortex CMS, the in-house platform powering much of CareerBuilder.com's content needs. This platform unified the disparate sources of content across CareerBuilder, which were provided either by Drupal or by Wordpress. Built with Ruby, Rails, Elasticsearch, Grape, Angular 1.x, RiotJS, Sinatra, Haml, Sass and Gulp and Grunt.Features:* Nested multitenancy via use of awesome_nested_set* OAuth identity provider via Doorkeeper and Devise* RESTful API interface via Grape* Bulk upload system* Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform* On-the-fly Localization over HTTPFor this effort, I also helped build or built supporting libraries, such as the API client, OmniAuth strategy, i18n over HTTP system, and more. Many contributions were made to the test suite and its harness, which was built with RSpec, Mocha and Capybara. Additionally, I created the DevOps and CI/CD process atop Cloud 66, Docker and Travis CI.Architected initial re-usable style/component libraries for use across the company, adhering to new branding guidelines. These modular styles/mixins, coupled with re-usable and configurable React components, allow us to quickly put together new marketing pages on-demand.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

* Planned and created Ophiel, a Scorm 1.2-compliant courseware player in JavaScript. Implemented the complex and tedious business logic and data model described by the Department of Defense's Scorm/CMI specification. This was intended to be used as part of an in-house Learning Management System (LMS), which eventually became Cortex Content Management System (CMS).* Helped create and manage ResumeHero/Encompass (https://www.cbresumehero.com/), a multitenant B2B resume authoring platform built in .NET MVC and Entity Framework.* Implemented and maintained feature work for in-house Drupal LMS platform.* Managed DevOps process and platform for ResumeHero. Setup TeamCity, Octopus and AWS.

Developed new replacement product (RealBasic, PHP, MySQL) for legacy 4Dv6-based Enterprise Resource Planning software. Was responsible for providing technical support for all of company's products. Wrote shopping cart software heavily integrated with Soft Solution's internal ERP, while still maintaining its extensibility. Created digital rights management tools for their software to combat software theft.

Online RPG written in Visual Basic/DirectX/Winsock/MySQL. Boasts 50,000 account registrations and a forum chock-full of lively community posts! The #7 RPG on CNET's Download.com 2008-2009. Server and client open sourced. Directed large team of administrators to build game content and manage user experience. It's also kind of garbage.