Hi!, So you want to know a bit more about me eh? Great! I'm all about sharing.
I'm a U.S. based full-stack web application engineer and manager that fell in love with computers, programming and software engineering back in the late 80's. Yep, thats how long I've been doing this stuff and love every minute of it....mostly LOL.
Archecture and Design
During my career as a web application and software developer I have had the opportunity to work across many different industries. manufacturing, publishing, advertising and various e-commerce product services to name a few. Each one with its own set of unique challenges that have given me a broad sense of how companies can utilize software and technology to improve and modernize their core business. Have a question about cloud technology? Need to modernize a legacy system? How about integration with other cloud based or Software-as-a-Sevice provider? Drop me a line to see how I might be able to help you.
Full-stack engineer
What does "full-stack" mean anyway. When you think and talk
about software that works over the world wide web its usually not just one technology we are talking about. Its many. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP, server-side languages (PHP, Python, Nodejs, Ruby, C#, Java), databases and SQL. A full-stack engineer is knowledgable in many of these technologies and most likely proficient in several. Through out my career I have worked with each of these technologies at varying levels. I believe in using the right tool for the job and based on your needs and requirements can use these tools to develop the right kind of software that will continue to enable your business for success.DevOps
If there is one word in the tech world over the last few years more nebulous than "The Cloud" its "DevOps". Simply put DevOps, is a blending or merging of the operations side of I.T. (servers, networking, administration, running and deploying software) with the software development and engineering side. Traditionally these two areas were very separate. The developers (Dev) wrote code and tested it in a vacuum. Not knowing or understanding the systems and environment the software would be running in. It was operations (Ops) job to deploy the code, get it running, and manage the environment. With the advent of "DevOps" this segmentation disappears. There is an open communication and knowledge sharing between both teams. Operations should have familiarity with the development stack and development should be familiar and understand the systems and operational needs of the software they produce. Toolchains and work flows can be put into place to help facilitate this collaboration. When you get the DevOps cycle working in your organization it can dramatically increase productivity, quality, and ownership. I am an avid practitioner of DevOps. I've seen it work and can help your organization embrace it.
Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)
One the main goals of any software developer or organization that produces software is to delivery value added features and enhancements that are as bug free as possible. CI/CD, if implemented properly, can you help you do that. The idea behind the concept is to integrate and deploy small increments of code to production rather than large feature sets that take longer periods to deploy or integrate. This process should be repeatable and as automated as possible. This is a developer culture shift as it requires organizations to embrace test-driven development(TTD). Teams need to adopt or build quality control toolchains that constantly test, integrate and deploy code. I have worked with several CI/CD tools sets including Jenkins, Travis, Gitlab-CI, Bamboo and TTD tools like PHPUnit, Rspec, Jasmine, Karama and Protractor. Need a hand getting your team or organization up to speed on CI and CD give me shout.
Leader
What makes a leader? How does a person know they are a leader? Questions any person should ask themselves when thinking about becoming a leader or in a leadership position. What do I think makes a leader? Someone that is humble and takes a service-oriented approach to the teams they manage. Someone that sets the direction but also listens to feedback and is not afraid to admit when they are wrong. A leader has the backs of the team but challenges them to do their best work. If you need help in building your development team or need to get an existing team back on track, get in touch to see how I may be able to help.