My Résumé

Software Engineering Director, (Feb 2022–present)

• Led the continued growth of the software engineering team.
• Continued integration with other Barracuda teams and platforms.
• Expanded our team's responsibility for more apps & systems.

Software Engineering Manager, (Apr 2021–Jan 2022)

• Led the software engineering team as it expanded from two to seven engineers.
• Consolidated and simplified architecture and platform.
• Served as scrummaster, running sprints for a 30+ person tech ops team.

Senior Software Engineer, (Feb 2020–Mar 2021)

• Focused primarily on SKOUT's new partner/customer dashboard (React/node), plus some internal apps and data processing pipelines.
• Developed several new dashboard screens & features. Highlight: a from-scratch custom report builder, with reports rendered in React, pdf download, and recurring scheduling.
• Contributed dozens of visible function & ux improvements, often coupled with underlying security, quality, and maintainability improvements.
• Process: introduced CI/CD (gitlab), automated unit testing (Jest), code reviews, stable & predictable deploy routines, bug triage, etc.

My team builds & maintains the thomasnet.com website, a B2B resource for US industrial companies. Along with the main website, we build maintain dozens of backend tools for content production, reporting & analytics, ad serving, client portals, seo management, sales, and integrations with partner & legacy systems.

We're modernizing and simplifying the whole stack—in-place & without disruption—while also delivering steady improvements to usability, performance, SEO, and adding new features and functions. This includes gradually reshaping the architecture to make it more scalable and more maintainable:

• ALB instead of ELB,
• Node lambdas instead of PHP pages,
• React instead of jQuery,
• Re-shaping the data,
• Consolidating other languages/platforms.

Sampling of accomplishments:

• Helped hire and organize a new software engineering team to work on thomasnet.com and the supporting backend systems. Led a 3–4 person "pod" of developers. Responsible for estimating and refining stories, sprint planning, and balancing trade-offs to ensure delivery of sprint commitments.
• Proposed, planned, and completed several complex in-place overhauls of site architecture, to support our rapid growth in registered users and in overall traffic. The result was greater scalability, reduced code & architecture complexity, and lower infrastructure costs. For example: replaced hundreds of on-page-load SQL queries with S3 data objects, generated by hourly/nightly processes.
• Replaced multiple custom article & newsletter management systems with a single more powerful CMS. Configured Nuxeo (off-the-shelf product) as the foundation, and created a custom GraphQL data layer, a user-facing React app, and new publishing processes.
• Replaced 3rd-party user data & single-sign-on product with a simpler and more scalable custom system. Included creation of a backward-compatible api and gradual migration of several sites & tools, with no downtime or impact on users.

The thomasnet.com site and many of its content systems were originally created and maintained by CMG.

• In our flat org (which varied in size from 10–20 senior developers and analysts) I served a dual role of 50/50 project manager and senior developer, adjusting based on the needs of each project.
• Served as direct point of contact for about 30–40 product owners, business analysts, developers, project managers, etc. at Thomas, with weekly meetings at their NY office.
• Improved dev environments, introduced source code management, introduced issue tracking. Improved project management, security, efficiency, testing, quality, and communication of our dev team's work.
• Thomas's size/age/complexity (both the organization and the technology) was daunting. I mastered a lot of arcane history, and then helped gradually simplify and streamline systems.

Built the FootPrints service desk product.
Now owned by BMC Software: www.footprintsservicedesk.com.

Product Development Director, Numara Software (May 2008–Oct 2011)

• Responsible for all aspects of product development, with a larger team (26 full-time employees in 2 US locations, 13 offshore, 4 local contractors).
• Integrated a 15-person development team in our Tampa office with the existing 10-person team in NJ, resolving vast differences in culture, skillset, personality & process.
• Managed relationships with other departments, negotiating projects, processes and priorities.
• Transitioned the team to more formal roles & processes, while retaining agility and flexibility.
• Developed the team’s ability to work on multiple major releases in parallel, delivering some very large multi-year, multi-developer features, while still maintaining a regular release/update cadence.
• Managed an 18-month redesign of the product with a design firm, successfully meeting our two goals: improving the product UI, and improving our team’s UX capabilities.
• Employee development: worked with managers and developers to continually improve their skills and expertise, empowering them to grow as team leaders.

Development Manager / Lead, Numara Software (Aug 2006–May 2008)

• Co-managed a 10-person development team, with 3 direct reports, while still playing the role of lead developer about 75% of my time.
• Responsible for maintenance team, version control (migrated to Subversion), and builds.
• Led initiatives focused on security, style, code reviews, and testing.

Lead Software Developer, UniPress Software (Nov 1997–Aug 2006)

• Helped lead the development team as it grew from 2 to 9 developers.
• Designed, developed, and supported key product features, including email integration, reporting, user rights, integrations with other products, authentication, automated business workflow, internationalization. 
• Improved product performance, supportability, and stability. Worked with tech support (and directly with customers) to troubleshoot and fix problems.
• Helped new hires develop intangible skills, e.g. the art of debugging, writing maintainable code, etc.