GF Labeled is a website that helps those with gluten intolerances (e.g. Celiac disease) find labeled and certified gluten free products. I started building the website to both scratch my own itch (my daughter has Celiac disease) as well as an opportunity to learn a new programming language (Rust) and some new technologies (Machine Learning / AI).The code is 95% Rust with some Python glue code for the Machine Learning / AI. The website uses the axum web application framework along with Tantivy as the search backend. I trained an AI model to be able to detect the various Gluten Free Certification logos on product packaging that I am using to identify Gluten Free products that would otherwise be missed.

Highlands Fiber Network (HFN) is the community owned fiber network that serves the Issaquah Highlands community with up to gigabit internet service. I have been involved with HFN since 2004 originally as a member of the Advisory Group when the network was still owned by Port Blakely. In 2013 I was part of the team that negotiated and managed the acquisition of the network on behalf of the community.

I worked full-time for TecAlliance from 2015 through the end of 2023. Frugal Mechanic (and our "Eluvio" trade name) was basically acqui-hired by TecAlliance in 2015 to provide full-time development services. Those services continued until 2020 at which point I went direct with TecAlliance to continue full time software development.I was the tech lead for the catalog backend development team. I spent ~75% of my time coding and the rest training, mentoring, reviewing code, etc. for the rest of the team.TecAlliance is a global market leader for part data and business solutions for the automotive aftermarket. TecAlliance owns the TecDoc data standard and is the primary data repository of TecDoc data for automotive aftermarket part data. Anybody needing access to this data is using data feeds or the official TecDoc Pegasus Web Service (which I ran for almost 10 years).I re-architected and re-implemented the official TecDoc Pegasus Web Service. The original web service (Java with Oracle and DB2 databases) was having performance and stability problems due to its extensive use of complex and slow SQL queries. I leveraged some of the technology built at Frugal Mechanic along with the TecDoc Brazil Web Catalog (that was built at Eluvio) to completely rebuild the web service with a new technology stack based on Scala, Apache Solr and Amazon Web Services.I also built and ran the OptiCat Web Service using the ACES and PIES data standards as well as a combined web service that merged the TecDoc and ACES/PIES data models into a single API for markets that used both standards (e.g. Mexico).I designed the operational infrastructure on Amazon Web Services and evolved it over time to leverage infrastructure as code (IaC) using the Amazon Cloud Development Toolkit (CDK). We had a fully redundant multi-region deployment that leveraged a lot of AWS services.

Eluvio (not to be confused with eluv.io) was the evolution of Frugal Mechanic into a consulting business for the Automotive Aftermarket industry. During 2014 and early 2015 we did some contract work for OptiCat and their parent company, TecAlliance, before being basically acqui-hired by TecAlliance in mid 2015. After that Eluvio worked full time for TecAlliance.During 2014 Eluvio built the original OptiCat OnLine website (www.opticatonline.com) using ACES and PIES data from OptiCat. The website launched at the 2014 AAPEX and SEMA automotive trade shows. The website leveraged technology I developed at Frugal Mechanic.OptiCat (now JNPSoft OptiCat) put us in contact with their parent company, TecAlliance, who wanted us to also build a website for them using their TecDoc data. They specifically wanted to launch a new automotive parts catalog website for the Brazil market. The TecDoc data standard is very different from the ACES and PIES standards that we used at Frugal Mechanic and for the OptiCat website. But we were able to successfully deliver them a catalog website based on the TecDoc data standard.These projects led to Eluvio working full time for TecAlliance.I was responsible for ~80% of the coding and 95% of the operations for all of these projects.

Frugal Mechanic was an automotive aftermarket parts comparison shopping startup that I co-founded which raised money from Founders' Co-Op in Seattle. We launched Frugal Mechanic in the summer of 2008 and operated it until 2019 or so. I was responsible for all aspects of software development as well as operations of the site. The site was originally prototyped using Ruby on Rails and was later transitioned to Scala. Apache Solr was used since day one to handle providing part and fitment data to the front end.We spent a lot of working de-duping part numbers across retailers so that customers could more accurately compare pricing on identical parts that retailers would list with different part numbers. We also had features like shipping costs, taxes and retailer coupons which we automatically included in the price comparisons.Over time we ended up receiving most of our part data from the manufacturers (either directly for via data repositories like OptiCat or SEMA Data Co-op). We supported the AutoCare Association's ACES and PIES data formats as well as the older AAIA Legacy format.By mid 2014 and early 2015 we had started doing some work for OptiCat (now JNPSoft OptiCat) and TecAlliance leveraging the technology that was developed at Frugal Mechanic. By the summer of 2015 we were acqui-hired by TecAlliance and doing full-time work for them. The terms of the acqui-hire agreement allowed us to provide a return on investment to Founder's Co-op.

Worked on various backend (C#/SQL) and frontend (ASP.NET) aspects of www.landwatch.com and www.resortscape.com. Introduced a wide array of open source technologies including: Subversion, Apache Solr/Lucene, Apache Tomcat, HAProxy, Nagios, Cacti, GIT, etc.I was the first non ex-Microsoft developer hired at SecondSpace and brought a very different background (e.g. Linux and Open Source) and perspective (e.g. not everything needs to be solved with SQL Server) to the company.My major success at SecondSpace was replacing the entire search backend with Apache Solr. This was a massive undertaking that resulted in a 100x speedup of the search functionality on the website. This replaced a lot of very complex SQL Server queries that were slow and causing some web pages to take more than 30 seconds to load. I developed a prototype implementation showcasing the performance and capabilities of Apache Solr and followed that up with a complete implementation that was successfully launched into production. This was a solo project which resulted in an Innovation Stock Grant award.Other accomplishments include:- Replacing Visual Source Safe with Apache Subversion- Creating a fully redundant load balancing solution using HAProxy and Keepalived on Linux- Setting up a Nagios monitoring solution

Corporate Accounts Team (August 2005 – April 2007)Member of the Corporate Accounts team whose mission is to make Amazon’s B2B business as successful as Amazon’s B2C business. Mainly worked with Java technologies (e.g. JSF, Hibernate, Spring, Axis) and MySQL but also used Ruby On Rails, C++ and Perl.Supplier Information Services Team (February 2004 – August 2005)Member of the Supplier Information Services team whose mission is to acquire, maintain, and provide access to all critical reference data about Amazon’s vendors for use in inventory planning and fulfillment decisions. Mostly used C++, Perl, Oracle, and BerkeleyDB but also used Java, PHP, and MySQL.

I started working part time for Sparkart during my first year at the University of Washington. By my final year at the University of Washington I was working full-time for Sparkart while also taking on a full Computer Engineering course load. It was a great time! I continued to work full-time for Sparkart for ~6 months after I graduated before moving over to Amazon.I wore multiple hats at Sparkart where we developed LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack websites for well-known bands like Linkin Park, Korn, Static-X, Rob Zombie and Josh Groban. This included both the front-end as well as the backend content management systems that customers would use to manage content on their sites. Most of the band sites featured a vBulletin forums as well as a Java Applet based chat which was backed by an IRC server. Over time I also acted as the system administrator and network administrator for ~15 Linux and FreeBSD servers along with a Juniper router (or two) and some Cisco Arrowpoint load balancers that were co-located at an Equinix data center in Silicon Valley.I had a large part in developing the original version of the Linkin Park Underground website which is a membership based fan club website.I developed a PHP extension (written in C) to speed up our common initialization logic that ran on every page load. I think the PHP version of the initialization code took ~50ms to run while the C version only took ~5ms or so. It was a nice performance improvement for every single page load.