Deal Pepper, Inc. — Denver, Colorado

VP of Software Development (including hands-on coding and UI/UX/product design)

Don't let the title scare you. Head of software development for a 7-person local startup with the mission of making daily deals a better experience for consumers.

Launched a robust product supporting 11,000+ users in under 5 months. Responsible for making sure our whole development effort is successful. Management: manage the efforts of an internal senior developer, an external design team, technical vendors/services, and an external iPhone development firm. Recruit and hire technical staff, and evaluate and select our technical vendors. Design, plan, and prioritize application features. Hands-on technical: UI/UX/product design and wireframing; object-oriented architecture; algorithm design; code in Ruby on Rails/HTML/jQuery/Javascript; configure servers with Chef and other tools; test code with RSpec, factory_girl, WebRat, and SimpleCov; monitor application performance with New Relic; analyze user behavior with ClickTale.

Technical system details: Ruby on Rails app hosted on 3+ Linux instances in "the cloud" on Engine Yard/Amazon EC2: 1+ app instances with Nginx and Passenger, a MySQL database instance, and a utility instance with Sphinx and Delayed Job. Chef recipes are used to configure custom components for different boxes. App can make phone calls to business owners and interact with them through interactive voice response (IVR) using the Twilio API/platform. System aggregates deals from dozens of deal providers by parsing feeds and scraping sites with Ruby scripts. Custom-built recommendation engine sends email to 90% of users every day matching their unique preferences. App interfaces with Amazon S3, IP-To-Geo translation service, Facebook, Google Maps, ClickTale, and Google Analytics. Back-end components include Sphinx for fast text and geo searching, Devise for authentication, Delayed Job for background processing, CarrierWave for file upload management, ImageMagick/MiniMagick for image manipulation, among others.

TechPunch LLC — Denver, Colorado

Software Developer

Develop Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and enterprise web applications for domains including Sales, Education, Marketing, Telecom, and Entertainment.

On a high-level, language components include Flex/Flash/ActionScript, Java, PHP, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Javascript, XHTML, CSS, AJAX, SQL, and HTTP/XML Web Services (SOAP & REST). Third-party application integration and custom development including Facebook social platform, WordPress blog, SugarCRM, OpenX ad server, Aweber email marketing, shopping carts, Crafty Syntax Live Help. Support tools and technologies including MySQL, ActiveRecord & Hibernate ORM frameworks, Lucene/Solr, CodeIgniter, Kohana, PureMVC, Robotlegs and Cairngorm MVC frameworks.

Technical Liaison, Owner (now Techpunch LLC dba Denver Software People)

Help software development managers design optimized development teams for new projects. Locate, engage and deliver contractual software developers. During this time, I also partnered with Babich & Associates in Dallas to provide permanent placement recruiting services under the name Babich & Associates of Denver.

Datavantage Corporation (subsidiary of Micros, Inc.) — Solon, Ohio

Sr. Software Development Contractor

Designed and developed high-performance, commercial-grade software for use by major national retailers.

Designed key features for customer loyalty and promotions management within an enterprise portal system using Enterprise Java (JEE/J2EE), Liferay Enterprise Portal implementation of the Java Portlet API specification (JSR 168), JBoss & Jetty, Tomcat, Struts, Swing Applets, Java Data Objects (JDO), Spring, Hibernate, Quartz, Oracle and Postgres. Developed under SuSE Linux. Tools included Eclipse, Ant, JUnit, CVS, CruiseControl, and JIRA. Interfaced with external applications via XML/SOAP Web Services.

Participated in all phases of the software development life cycle, including analysis, design, code, test, integration and implementation. The end product is a customer relationship management (CRM) system sold to Datavantage's large retail customer base, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Jos. A Bank, Zales, The North Face, Neiman Marcus, Kroger, Brownshoe, and H&M.

Northrop Grumman IT at NASA Glenn Research Center — Brook Park, Ohio

Lead Software Engineer for the Station Support Computer Module

Designed and wrote main software for the Station Support Computer Module, which is a system of on-orbit displays and astronaut interfaces for the International Space Station Fluids and Combustion Facility. The Facility is a distributed system of embedded computers for conducting microgravity science experiments.

Designed and developed the foundational object-oriented software that allowed command, control, monitoring, and polling of the Facility.

Wrote over 30,000 lines of Java. Wrote requirements and design documents. Created and delivered presentations for software design reviews. Worked closely with fellow engineers to define system-wide requirements and protocols. Used Artisan software modeling tool to create Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams including Use-Case, Class, State, Collaboration and Sequence Diagrams. Managed resources of a co-op student for useful contributions to development. Created and maintained the Java flight software schedule.

Worked with a small team to design custom protocols for communication among distributed applications within the Facility and to the Space Station. Implemented the command and data protocols in C++ and Java using sockets (network connections), custom packets and support objects. Wrote over 3,000 lines of C++.

Participated in software design reviews, code reviews, document reviews and hardware-software integration tests.

Business Objects/Crystal Decisions — remote side job

Software Development Subcontractor

Developed custom ETL software in Java to merge database systems for a corporate merger between Business Objects and Crystal Decisions. Bridged information between Oracle and SQLServer databases and a Salesforce.com CRM database accessible through Web Services via an XML API.

oopdreams software, inc. — remote side job

Software Engineering Consultant

Ported a hugely successful handheld game to the Windows desktop platform. Ported original code from WindowsCE and PalmOS to the Win32 platform.

SprintPCS.com — remote side job

Software Engineering Subcontractor

Developed a knowledge base web application using Java Server Pages (JSP) and MySQL. The application managed information about SprintPCS.com's servers, databases, applications, and networks.

Business Objects and Salesforce.com — remote side job

Software Engineering Subcontractor

Designed and developed a Java application to bridge Business Objects' sales leads data between an Oracle database and the Salesforce.com CRM database. The Salesforce.com database was accessed through Web Services via an XML API.

Case Western Reserve University School of Law — Cleveland, Ohio

Expert Witness

Provided technical consultation about general Internet security and protocols for a law suit dealing with network identity fraud. Retained as expert witness.

oopdreams software, inc. — Chicago, IL

Software Engineering Consultant

Developed library routines in C for floating point number manipulation to replace some of the PalmOS API routines which, at the time, contained bugs.

Rise Above It — Denver, CO

Charitable Developer/Technical Consultant

Developed original PHP site pro bono for a local non-profit cancer benefit organization. Recruited WordPress developer and arranged recent redevelopment. Ongoing technical consultation.