Summary

I am a software developer, technical speaker and open source enthusiast. For 8 years I focused on the design and development of object-oriented ecommerce and enterprise systems in Java. Five years ago I switched to Ruby and focused on building systems with open source tools. I'm currently based in San Francisco but am looking to relocate to Portland.

Professional Experience

Carbon Five (01/2011 - Present)

Technical Lead

Moved to San Francisco and did independent Ruby consulting for 6 months before joining C5.

Developer and project lead for customer engagements with Carbon Five, a web development services company. In this role, I advised clients on proper development process, building scalable systems with Ruby and OSS tools and led a team of developers building software (usually Rails web sites, e.g. http://manilla.com) for clients. Sample technologies: jruby, redis, rspec, heroku, jquery.

OneSpot Corporation (03/2009 - 06/2010)

Software Engineer

Ruby and systems developer. I led development of our 2nd and 3rd generation message queue processing systems, automated system provisioning, content generation and caching. Worked with technologies like Varnish, nginx, Passenger, thin, Sinatra, EventMachine, Rails, Ruby, Cassandra, Solr, RabbitMQ, postgresql, ec2 and Chef. I pushed a lot of open source based on my work to Github. Spoke at LoneStarRubyConf and Austin on Rails during this time on various technical subjects.

FiveRuns Corporation (09/2007 - 3/2009)

Software Engineer

I've spent the last 15 months building FiveRuns' Manage and Dash (unreleased) services. I personally focus on the lower-level portions of our service, building http-based services, data processing via message queuing and performance tuning both Ruby code and MySQL schema. I've contributed to many open source projects during this time and spoken at several conferences and user groups in the US and Europe including Rubyconf and Railsconf Europe.

Webify Solutions, IBM Corp (05/2003 - 09/2007)

Software Architect

My long-term focus at IBM (which acquired Webify in 8/06) is the design and implementation of service-oriented applications based on IBM's Business Services Fabric middleware. Since these applications are different from traditional monolithic applications, there is a real need to design and document how to build these applications.

Accomplishments

Education

Cornell University, BS and M.Eng, Computer Science

Speaking

I have given talks at LoneStar RubyConf, RailsConf Europe, RubyConf, OSON and several regional user groups.

Spare Time

In my spare time, I like working on numerous OSS projects and race motorcycles. See my GitHub page for more details.