🧔 About Me
- I am a senior engineering director who strives to build and support both exceptional web apps and extraordinary software development teams. I have experience building web applications that are scalable and maintainable, iterating on engineering hiring and production processes to meet the company's changing needs, managing and mentoring engineering staff/managers for performance and growth, and fostering a strong positive team culture that promotes best practices and collaboration.
📫 How to Reach Me
- Connect with me on LinkedIn!
👨💻 Currently Working On
- Developing equities trading algorithms and market indicators.
- A Hearthstone-like collectible card game written in TypeScript with a React front-end.
- A TypeScript GameBoy emulator.
📖 Currently Reading
- ISO 27001 security guidelines.
🛠 Skills
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Full Stack Web Development
- JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL
- React, Angular, Backbone.js, Handlebars, jQuery
- Node.js, Electron, Ionic
- Jest, TestCafe
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Software Development
- Python, Java, C#, Bash
- Git, Linux
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Management
- Leadership, mentoring, interviewing, public speaking
- Project planning, resource estimation and allocation, delegation
- Team building, improving dev workflows, applying best practices, eliminating silos
👔 Experience
Art of Problem Solving
Senior Director of Engineering
Sep 2020 - Present
Coordinated with engineers and hiring managers to create the interviewing and on-boarding process for new DevOps roles in our organization. Identifying and adding these roles to our organization allowed us to introduce new skills and experiences to the engineering team, enabling us to modernize our infrastructure and support our diverse engineering operations across multiple products.
Collaborated with engineers to identify and implement high-impact improvements to system bottlenecks that limited our products' ability to scale. By creating better development tool-kits for back-end profiling and stress-testing, our team could locate slow operations and increase page load speed by a factor of 20. This allowed the AoPS Contest Platform to support 10,000+ concurrent contestants during the AMC 10/12A, F=ma, and MATHCOUNTS Chapter competitions.
Organized a task force to security audit and rebuild a mission-critical legacy production system responsible for rendering and storing high volumes of LaTeX documents and diagrams. Post-rebuild, our curriculum development tools which depended on this system saw a huge increase in reliability and speed.
Automated the engineering team's incident response process to improve time-to-resolution and lead time of post-incident tasks. By facilitating a consistent structure for responses, and encouraging a culture of ownership, our team was able to generate, collect, and audit incident data for recurring issues and causes.
Replaced monotonous standup-style status check-ins with optional tech-talks and project demos to foster knowledge-sharing within the team and give engineers a chance to show off their contributions. Our team has utilized this time to also schedule team trainings in less widely-understood features to minimize silos and lower bus factors.
Software Development Team Lead
Aug 2019 - Sep 2020
Coordinated the engineering department to introduce React and other modern front-end tools into software engineering workflows. Researched and got buy-in from multiple product engineering teams to decide on libraries, coding conventions, and policies.
Worked around management software budgets by independently developing and documenting a git-based in-house performance measuring tool. The application offered at-a-glance information that enabled engineering leadership to identify productivity trends and give timely feedback to software engineers during a critical transition from an in-office to remote workforce.
Integrated Slack API to send instant service alerts to tech support and operations teams, decreasing the first-response-time of unexpected issues during COVID19.
Collaborated with engineering leadership to facilitate and promote a strong team culture of documentation in high-impact areas of the code-base. Introduced a process by which engineering teams elected a documentation champion who could audit pull requests and enforce agreed upon documentation standards.
Software Engineer
Sep 2018 - Aug 2019
Improved the ease and efficiency of creating interactive educational software by developing a flow-based programming framework with React and Typescript. This framework offered our team a standard generic interface for creating modular front-end components that could be linked together in many ways. This style of development facilitated high code re-use, easy validation and unit testing, and accelerated feature development.
Designed the front-end and back-end architecture for an educational chat-bot which could teach students throughout self-paced courses, and perform analytics on student interactions. The chat-bot runtime traversed a graph-like data structure which contained the conversational branches and problem data created by curriculum developers.
Implemented cloud-based front-end error logging with Sentry, and helped institute processes for engineers to regularly audit and resolve errors. This led to the discovery of critical dependency failures and the reduction of front-end errors by over 70%.
Integrated parallelized unit-testing and code linting with CircleCI. This parallelization offered optimal performance on a large code base, and granted engineers quick testing feedback on every pushed commit.
Collaborated with one of our principal engineers to make modern web features available to our team with the creation of a custom Node.js-based compilation/build suite that heavily utilized Babel and Rollup.
Stream Warrior Deluxe
Sole Proprietor, Developer
Jan 2015 - Jan 2019
Independently developed and published a SaaS desktop application for gaming streamers which generated over 10,000 lifetime users. Built primarily with jQuery and Electron.JS, this application integrated the most popular game streaming platforms and offered a unified suite for designing subscriber and donation alerts, custom no-code chatbot commands, and various real-time animations/interactions.
During development, contributed to open-source project "tmi.js", a JavaScript library for the Twitch API.
Freelance Web Developer
Aug 2014 - Jul 2019
- Designed and developed web pages for small businesses using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 and Adobe CC.
UC Berkeley GameCraft
Student Software Project Lead
Sep 2016 - Dec 2016
- Directed and mentored a team of student developers to deliver a functional game prototype using the Unity3D game engine.
Grossmont College
Student Web Admin
Jun 2015 - Jun 2016
Reduced customer inquiry volume by adding the latest federal financial aid resources into the Grossmont College financial aid website, including program and scholarship information that was previously available exclusively in-person.
Communicated with the IT director to ensure the college's web quality standards were maintained.
🎓 Education
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Western Governors University
- B.S. Software Development, Information Technology
📜 Certifications
- ITIL Foundation Level
- Comptia Project+
- Comptia A+
- CIW Advanced HTML5 & CSS3 Specialist
- CIW Site Development Associate
- CIW User Interface Designer
- Microsoft Software Development Fundamentals