Securing the digital future.

GroundBreaker is a B2B SaaS platform that helps small to medium size Real Estate Investment firms organize and service their deal pipeline, raise capital, distribute returns and manage relationships with their investor pool.- Migrated Legacy App (Rails) to AWS EC2, RDS, and ElasticCache using Ansible for Configuration Management and Deployment.- Was the main architect and lead developer of our new production platform.- The new platform is an Event-Driven Architecture, using the following AWS Serverless technologies: - AWS AppSync for GraphQL API - AWS Step Functions for Orchestrated Micro Services - AWS DynamoDB is the main Data Store - AWS Cognito for User Identity and Authentication - AWS DynamoDB Streams as primary Event Source - AWS SNS + AWS SQS as Message Broker + Message Queue - AWS Lambda for Event Consumers, primarily written in Go and Node.js - AWS CloudFront + S3 for hosting our UIs, File Uploads, and other Front-end assets - AWS CloudFormation for Configuration Management - AWS Elasticsearch Service for full text search and multi-value data filtering when DynamoDB wasn't enough. - Full CI/CD Pipelines for EVERYTHING. With future plans to implement Canary Releases in the future. - Various other AWS Services as needed (KMS, IAM, Route 53, CloudWatch, etc)- Designed our Data Security protocols: - All Data was Encrypted At Rest & In Transit - Sensitive Fields (Federal Tax IDs, Bank Account Numbers, etc) were Encrypted "In Use": - Wrote a go library that Implemented Key Encapsulation (aka Envelope Encryption) using AWS KMS + NaCi SecretBox (XSalsa20 (Stream Cipher), Poly1305 (Message Authentication)). - Each key is only used once per field for maximum security. - Was responsible for all members of our small Engineering Team (recruiting, hiring, mentoring, retention, performance)- Worked closely with all areas of the business (product, sales, marketing, operations)

Mac & Mia's goal is to define tomorrow’s consumer retail experience, and evolve it beyond traditional brick & mortar and ecommerce. The entire organization is driven by the desire to delight our customers at every step, and to remove the friction pervasive in other retail models. During my tenure, I successfully:- Overhauled the development process, and implemented a modern CI/CD workflow that sped up our ability to ship quality code- Architected and led the development efforts for multiple projects, including a marketing website redesign, the launch of a new product line "Mac & Mia Gifts", and several internal tools focused on sales and operations- Recruited, Hired, and Mentored a small, but diverse team of passionate software developers- Built and launched a number of products and services written in Python, Node.js, and Vue.js

ReviewTrackers is an award-winning review monitoring and reputation management software platform trusted by tens of thousands of business locations across North America and beyond.During my tenure, I successfully lead efforts to:- Rewrite the entire platform, from the ground up, using a distributed, event-driven architecture using a mix of Go, Ruby, React/Redux, Node.js, and Scala- Design a world class interview process for recruiting and hiring the best engineering talent in Chicago- Build an amazing team of 15 cross-functional, full-stack engineers and product people, in addition to managing a team of up to 8 offsite engineers overseas- Model and nurture the Engineering Culture inside the team, as well as having an impact on the Company Culture at large- Establish a reliable, and repeatable software development and deployment process- Mentor and Coach employees on my team, and across the company, in both technical and non-technical skills

- Helped Launch 3 major products including: - StyleSeek (Menswear / Women's Apparel Recommendation Engine), - Tastebud Games (innovator in the Facebook Maketing and Promotional Game space) - Tastebud Retail (Whitelabel Personalized Mobile Coupon Platform)- Led engineering efforts, primarily by example, resulting in a highly modular, reusable environment made up of 60+ code bases (many of them small, reusable libraries, homegrown frameworks, and domain specific languages) that lowered our time-to-market, increased the cross-functionality of our team, and enabled us to leverage an event-driven, service-oriented architecture with great success- API Design and Development, Both JSON-RPC and full REST/Hypermedia- System Architecture and Administration with: AWS (S3, EC2, Redshift, IAM, etc), Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Apache Solr, and Heroic- Utilized Puppet to create a DevOps workflow approach to systems and configuration management to achieve 12 Factor app design- Designed and Developed a "Big Data" processing pipeline to evaluate, classify, and enhance the millions of interactions captured on our platforms to derive consumer insights, behavior analysis, and allow us to personalize our offerings and predict user preferences- Built and optimized multiple full-text search engines, utilizing Apache Solr- Built and deployed multiple relevance engines to power our personalization offerings- Provided mentoring and guidance across the organization & continually sought out new ways to unlock our team's potential- Encouraged and fostered our company's participation in the open source community, by releasing non-business specific code under the MIT License and providing patches to a wide variety of open source projects we were utilizing in our own work- Worked with the executive team to build out a world-class engineering team, including designing and evolving our interviewing and hiring process

Team Lead of the VetGovPartner.com 2.0 Project, a business social network and conference agenda for the National Veterean's Conference held in Detroit -- June 26 - 29, 2012.Responsibilities:- Directly Responsible for a team of 3 Developers and 1 Ux in Chicago- Provided leadership, guidance, mentoring and direction to all members of the team- Performed code reviews (via github pull requests)- Managed Automated Builds- Established and Maintained automated testsuite (minitest)- Helped establish and enforce our Development Process- Wrote Documentation- Ruby Development (feature development, refactoring and bug fixing)- Co-Managed Software Releases- Provided onsite assistance at the conference to users of the software- Pivotal Tracker Management and Grooming- Co-Lead Scrum Calls and Planning Meetings

Rocking the Social Travel / Local Discovery space with an amazing team.Duties include:* Software Development in Ruby, JavaScript/CoffeeScript (jQuery, Underscore.js, Backbone.js), and Ruby on Rails* Data Store Schema Design (MySQL, Redis and MongoDB)* Implementing and maintaining Deployment best practices with custom Capistrano scripts.* Systems Engineering for our Dev, Staging and Production environments (using Puppet for configuration management)* Development Team Leadership and Programmer Mentoring, promoting and coaching programmer best practices, including incremental/agile development, test driven development (with RSpec), object design and continuous testing/integration* Perform code reviews (via github pull requests) to vet code for production worthiness* Shepard releases through testing and into Production* Hypermedia API Design and Development using the Goliath.io Ruby Framework and RESTful best practices

Head Nerd in Charge at Chicago's premier design agency, specializing in developing a variety of solutions with WordPress and other open source technologies, including but not limited to ruby, bash, and python.Duties include:- Proving Training and Mentoring to a growing development team - Architecting solutions before and after the sale- Systems Engineering and Administration of a 10+ Node Linux cluster utilizing NIS, NFS, Heartbeat, DRDB - running on VPS Ubuntu Servers at Linode- Implementing and Improving an ad-hoc Agile Development process that takes into account the various skill levels of the distributed development team that includes members in 3 countries and 4 timezones- Collaborate cross-functionally with members at every level of the organization and in every department, including Project Management, Design and Development, Sales, and Operations- Creation of a variety of tools, frameworks, and shell scripts to automate routine parts of the development lifecycle- Providing WordPress plugin and theme development for our most important clients- "Digital Janitor"; The technology bucks stopped with me, which meant that if something needing doing (and doing right), I was usually the one that picked up the slack and got it done.

XENTEK is my consulting company, specializing in Hypermedia APIs, Distributed Systems, DevOps Automation, and software engineering.

Multi-National Publishing company with over 60 brands in the US, including Parenting, Popular Science, Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, Transworld, Saveur, Carribean Travel & Life, and many more.I was responsible for the User Generated Content / Web 2.0 / Social Media / Community strategy and development, with a strong focus on Open Source technologies such as Drupal, WordPress, Zend Framework, Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Memcached.

Systems Engineering, Administration, and ColdFusion Development

This is a record label, and artist development company I co-founded. I was responsible for the initial organization of its vision, internet strategy, web site infrastructure, eCommerce, and business operations.Once organized, I stepped out of the way to allow Mic Mell, one of the other co-founders, to take the reigns; as Polyvibe really started with his grand vision to transform the music industry as we know it. And by doing so, I was freed up to concentrate on other projects.

I was asked back to Cendant Timeshare Resort Group, now Wyndham Vacation Ownership, to evaluate the remaining ASP sites that I had brought in house during my original contract to evaluate and prepare them for a Level 1 PCI (Payment Card Industry) External Audit.However, due to Cendant, the parent company, selling their Timeshare Resorts to Wyndham, their regulatory burden changed and they no longer required a Level 1 Audit. The project's funding was then redirected to their Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) initiatives. I was able to end the contract early, since the scope of the work they required of my had changed so dramatically. (I didn't want to go back to 'just' maintaining the ASP sites, when regardless of their regulatory burden, there was no funding for me to follow up on the security recommendations I had drawn up for them).

Internet Documents is an innovative, hosted Document Management System, targeting the Title Insurance and other paper heavy industries. Its goal is to create a paperless office, by providing a tool set for any vertical market to create a work flow that works for them, and not against them.I was responsible for writing all of the initial code (100,000+ lines of custom PHP), and then working to help ready the product for market, guiding the organization from being a Web 1.0 Application Service Provider (ASP) to Web 2.0 Software as a Service (SaaS) platform.

I was instrumental in taking 60 "Classic" ASP (Active Server Pages) based web sites, and bringing them in house to be hosted and maintained at the corporate data center.I evaluated each site, fixed any issues with the software, rewrote or replaced batch processes with sophisticated Data Transformation routines (utilizing the tools in MS SQL Server) and generally kept these sites alive while the core team completed their J2EE implementation of the new versions. I also worked briefly with the Information Architecture team to web service enable a couple of the ASP sites, as the organization was undergoing a huge SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) initiative.My skills were leveraged against many different departments, including: Architecture, Security, Billing, Mainframe, Customer Management, Operations, Strategy, Marketing & Sales. Each of these departments had a stake in the 60 ASP sites I was responsible for, and I worked diligently for them to ensure that their needs were met.

Managed a multi-state direct mail marketing campaign on behalf of Microsoft Business Solutions to organize and invite CFOs to discovery days in order to introduce them to all of Microsoft's Accounting Software (Great Plains, Solomon, et al). These discovery days were run and presented by Value Added Resellers (VARs), who were our clients along with MS. These events were coordinated and followed up by our call center staff, who would secure the prospects' participation in these events by making human contact before, during and after the presentation.I also consulted the Graphic Designers on how to build web sites the right way, and did some of their back-end programming. After their IT Intern left, and before they found a replacement, I also acted as their Chief Technology Officer briefly, managing their Lead Database (built on MS SQL Server), and providing desktop support to the entire organization.

QA Tested "NCAA" and "Madden" video games.

Web Developer (ASP 'Classic', SQL Server & Visual Basic)Web DesignerGraphic Designer

* Web Design with HTML, CSS, JS and PhotoShop* Content Creation and cultivation for AOL/CompuServe properties* Basic ASP/PHP Programming on a variety of internal and client facing products