TechPunch — Denver, Colorado
Programmer, Architect, Mentor and other hats
Most Recent Project - ADT - February 2017 - March 2020
Worked on a tiny, powerhouse engineering team at ADT to deliver Alexa and Google Home apps allowing ADT customers to interact with security systems and smart devices via voice. Designed and built high-profile systems using about 90% Clojure and 10% Java & Ruby. Integrated security panels, smart door locks, lighting, thermostats, sensors, cameras and garage door controllers.
I was the senior go-to Clojure engineer, contributing about 80% of the total Clojure design and code with over 10,000 lines/50,000 expression nodes of Clojure in active use. Mentored others developers on Clojure and Java best practices and design. Apps are composed of several web services, serving about 100,000 active users — the busiest Java service doing about 10 million requests/day and the busiest Clojure service about 2.7 million requests/day.
Runs in AWS, using EC2, S3, RDS, Lambdas, DynamoDB (a Key-Value/NoSQL/Document DB), ElastiCache Redis, Postgres. Implemented Alexa Custom Skills and Smart Home Skills, as well as Google's Actions and api.ai/Dialogflow/Home/Assistant platforms; heavy OAuth integration with a wide variety of systems, acting as both server and client.
After demonstrating early success with a few Alexa features, we were chosen as Amazon's preferred home security partner for Alexa. I worked closely with Amazon, including travel to their Seattle offices, as they built Alexa support for the features we were building. Worked similarly with Google engineers over voice/video calls and email. Built relationships with key people at both Amazon and Google in their voice projects.
Other Projects
Prior projects include major software applications in Health Care, Sales, Education, Marketing, Telecom and Entertainment. Clients included McKesson Health Solutions (3+ year Java project building a heavily used external-facing application), Level 3 Communications, a successful interactive media firm, a successful start-up for helping parents with child Internet usage, and others.
Ongoing development of in-house finance, stock market and value investing software.
Broad experience with people skills: management, sales, mentoring, teaching.