About Me
I've got a masters degree in computer science and over 10 years of experience building web-based systems using Java/J2EE, Ruby, Rails and PHP. I'm a strong believer in the effectiveness of Agile Methods. Read more »Subscribe
I've got a masters degree in computer science and over 10 years of experience building web-based systems using Java/J2EE, Ruby, Rails and PHP. I'm a strong believer in the effectiveness of Agile Methods. Read more »
Resume
PDF and Word versions of my resume are available.
Overview
Objectives
To develop and integrate software systems that accelerate the pace of innovation and human understanding about the world in which we live.
To work as part of an organization that values risk taking and invention as key components in a culture of development, growth and achievement.
To excel as an individual contributor and decision maker on technical matters.
Selected Experience
President and Principal Developer
Evans Codeworks Inc.
December 2007 – Present
Ithaca, NY
This project started out of an interest in expanding my technical skillset. I developed and nurtured relationships with businesses in the Finger Lakes region to generate project work. The work quickly became more than I could manage alone during my nights and weekends. So I assembled and coordinated teams of developers and Web designers to help complete these projects.
The nature of these projects varied from a device driver and custom desktop application for a manufacturing company, to a high-volume data acquisition and analysis tool for an SEO company, to a data conversion and delivery tool for a company specializing in electronic books, to a billing and CRM application for a hardware engineering company to a web services platform for a service provider to the banking and industry. These applications were built using a wide array of technology stacks including Ruby on Rails, J2EE, Javascript, C/C++ and .NET among others.
My biggest accomplishment in this position was simply being able to manage the responsibilities and time requirements of my clients while maintaining my full-time responsibilities at Cornell.
Technologies Used:
VB.NET, ASP.NET, PHP, CSS, Ruby on Rails, Web Services, J2ME, XML-RPC, WordPress, CakePHP, AJAX, JQuery, SQL Server 2008
Lead Developer for Kuali Implementation
Cornell University, Central IT Division
June 2009 – Present
Ithaca, NY
In this role my primary responsibility is to make technical implementation decisions. This involves reviewing requirements specifications and business analysis documents and proposing one or more (I usually aim to provide at least three) technical implementation plans including architecture and integration strategies. After an open review process which includes both functional and technical team members, my job then focuses on producing a high-quality deliverable.
One major contribution I made as an individual contributor as opposed to a team leader was a static analysis tool custom-designed for the Kuali Financial System. This system leverages an understanding of coding conventions in tandem with bytecode inspection and analysis to provide a complete dependency graph at several levels of granularity. I designed this system from scratch and built a prototype using Ruby on Rails. This allowed me to demonstrate the capabilities of the tool to various potential stakeholders and gather feedback. After a few iterations in Ruby I then rebuilt the application as a Java web application (using Spring MVC and JPA with Hibernate) for production use to allow for better integration with our other enterprise systems (including KFS which is also written in Java).
Technologies Used:
Java/J2EE, Oracle, MySQL, Spring, JPA, Hibernate, Tomcat, Eclipse
Lead Developer for Kuali Financial System development
Cornell University, Division of Financial Affairs
September 2006 – June 2009
Ithaca, NY
At the beginning of each release cycle I worked closely with functional stakeholders to understand functional requirements. I then developed technical specifications upon which the next ~9 months of work was based. Throughout the development cycle my responsibilities included providing guidance to more junior developers and developers new to the Kuali Financial System, ensuring compliance with the overall Service Oriented Architecture around which KFS is built, adherence to test-driven-development (TDD) principles and smooth integration between our functional module and all other system modules. I also made significant contributions as an individual contributor in the form of code.
Over the course of this three year span I worked on the high-volume batch processing system and user interfaces that make up the General Ledger, the integration-focused Accounts Receivable module and the data-driven and highly-customized Contracts and Grants module.
While maintaining these responsibilities I completed my Master of Engineering degree at Cornell.
Technologies Used:
Java/J2EE, XML, Oracle, Spring, Struts, OJB, Tomcat, Eclipse
Developer/DBA for Kuali Financial System development
Cornell University, Division of Financial Affairs
March 2005 – September 2006
Ithaca, NY
Technologies Used:
Java/J2EE, XML, Oracle, Spring, Struts, OJB, Tomcat, Eclipse, COBOL
Senior Programmer/Analyst for Financial Systems
Cornell University, Division of Financial Affairs
June 2004 – March 2005
Ithaca, NY
Technologies Used:
Java/J2EE, XML, Oracle, Toplink, WebLogic 8.1, JRun 4, JBuilder
Freelance Web Developer
Self Employed
July 2002 – June 2004
Ithaca, NY
Technologies Used:
PHP, MySQL
Java Software Engineer/Team Lead
Azurn Networks
April 2001 – July 2002
Waltham, MA
Technologies Used:
Java/J2EE, XML, Oracle, OC4J, Eclipse, Nuance Speech Objects, WAP
Education
Master of Engineering, Computer Science
Cornell University, 2007
Bachelor of Arts, Biology
Boston University, 1999
Research
Power-Aware Service Replication in Wireless Sensor Networks.
Adviser: Dr. Robbert Van Renesse.
Toolkit for Analyzing Web Graphs: A toolkit to enable analysis of the evolution of the link structure of the Internet.
Adviser: Dr. William Arms
Side Projects
A best-of-breed project management and team collaboration tool developed in Ruby on Rails. This project incorporates the best ideas from over 75 other project management applications, best-practices in social media and corporate micro-blogging tools with some novel ideas.
An Internet-scale service bus that could be characterized as a combination of Tarpipe, Yahoo! Pipes and the Zembly Client Library.
Other Points of Interest