Advance Local is one of the largest media groups in the United States, operating in more than 25 cities and reaching 50+ million people monthly.

Product Manager – Promoted to manage my team’s two products, one serving over 3 million API requests per day. Responsibilities include: stakeholder management; maintaining product road maps; grooming the backlog of stories and tasks, prioritizing team’s work, cost management and strategy, and creating and implementing business continuity and disaster recovery initiatives.

Software Engineer – Agile DevOps environment writing microservices using Atlassian tools (Jira, Stash/Bitbucket, wiki, Bamboo for CI/CD), GitLab, and GitHub; setting up monitoring and alerting systems (DataDog, PagerDuty); configured and maintained automated build and deployment plans in Bamboo; Infrastructure as Code using AWS CloudFormation, and system configuration using Ansible. Primary development in Python, next in ReactJS on the Arc Publishing platform.

Major initiatives – Application migration from the data center to AWS; Optimize applications to run in a cloud environment: reducing costs over 80% by “right-sizing” applications, utilizing autoscaling more effectively, using spot-fleets, and AWS Lambda function-as-a-service, without compromising any system reliability. Implemented a redundant Elasticsearch cluster with automated snapshots and restores. Played a major role in the initiative to migrate our publishing system (from Moveable Type to WaPo’s Arc Publishing platform), making sure old and new applications continued working as news sites were cut over to the new system.

Technologies used: Many AWS resources (CloudFormation, IAM, VPC, S3, API Gateway, Lambda, EC2, AutoScaling, DynamoDB, RDS Aurora and MySQL, SQS, SNS, Elasticsearch Service, Kinesis, ElastiCache Redis and Memcached, Route53, CloudWatch); JMeter for load and autoscaling testing; Server OS (Amazon Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu); utilize Docker for local development.

University Residences (UR) provides on-campus housing for students. My position has grown to be responsible for UR's web team as well as our web portfolio of web applications and web sites. My role has four major components: 1) Long-term strategic vision: primary architect of housing web systems; buy vs. build decision-making; staying current on new technology and trends; keeping track and prioritizing requests from users; ensuring accessibility and usability 2) Project management: using techniques from agile and traditional methods to take projects from initiation to completion 3) Development: writing code, mostly object-oriented; integrating disparate third-party systems using micro-services and RESTful APIs; providing code reviews and merging pull requests; infrastructural work to remove obstacles for other developers; database schema design; caching techniques and strategies; unit testing, distributed load testing, usability testing, user acceptance testing, and continuous integration. 4) Personnel management: leading a web team of software developers, server administrators, and usability coordinators; I am deeply involved in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, training, coaching, mentoring, providing feedback, and evaluating staff members; I help form an inclusive culture where people are comfortable asking questions, seeking feedback, and having fun building our housing system.

Technologies used: HTML (xhtml, html5, semantic structure); CSS (2 and 3, SCSS/SASS, bootstrap); Python (2 and 3, Django, bottle.py micro-framework, SQL Alchemy, docutils RST, reportlab PDF, Fabric); JavaScript (jQuery, AJAX, ReactJS); PHP (Zend Framework, PDO, PHP Unit, PHP Doc, Drupal and WordPress CMS); Version control (git, svn, cvs); Server OS (FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu); Web servers (Nginx, Apache); Databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite, Sybase, MS-SQL); Multimedia (Photoshop, Illustrator, Inkscape, Audacity, ffmpeg, handbrake)

Sofast Communications was the first high-speed internet provider in Great Falls. I was hired to work along-side a graphic designer, turning his Photoshop layouts into websites for clients. My role at Sofast evolved into web development as I worked on a community portal (Great Falls Online) with a database-driven business directory. My biggest project was working with a small team to build internal back-end applications handling customer billing and support. Working at Sofast allowed me to take concepts I was learning at the university and apply them to solve real business needs. Used PHP (LAMP stack) and ASP.net; Flash development (ActionScript); and Photoshop.

As a professor's assistant at the School of Business Administration, I graded classwork and led class workshops covering Photoshop and Flash. I also worked with a committee of faculty and staff to put together the MBA and Masters of Accountancy website using Active Server Pages (ASP).

I helped two elementary school-aged brothers learn English and contribute in class. We spent time reading together, I translated their school work, and I helped bridge cultural barriers between the family and the teachers.