I've been fortunate to work on a number of amazing projects. Here are some of my favorites.
billy
At billy, I was instrumental in developing a platform that dramatically improved how major U.S. construction companies manage over 100,000 insurance policies across 3,500+ projects and counting. My journey began as a contractor with minimal experience in Elixir—the core language of billy—yet, driven by curiosity and the support of adept colleagues, I rapidly gained proficiency on the Elixir/Phoenix stack, eventually becoming the first billy engineering FTE.
In my time at Billy, I touched every corner of the platform. We built services atop Elixir's OTP framework to run insurance compliance calculations and knock-on events such as triggering indexing processes. We created a highly responsive UI that delighted our customers with LiveView, Surface, AlpineJS, and Tailwind. We built mass emailing systems. And we were our own DevOps team, establishing a continuous integration, deployment, and secrets management systems.
As a software engineer with a strong bias towards action, I love solving problems. That tendency often translates into new product capabilities and, more importantly, business opportunities. My work on improving the vendor management experience at billy is just one example of this tendency. Two of my R&D time projects ultimately became the backbone of a best-in-class vendor management experience at billy: my work to integrate Flatfile for batch loading of vendor data and my implementation of Algolia for a highly responsive search-as-you-type vendor discovery interface. Both of these feature sets were ultimately critical to the success of the product as they helped billy grow beyond the capabilities of its competitors. Vendor management continues to be an area of strength for billy.
As an early technical leader, I was equally committed to fostering talent, onboarding new developers, and promoting a culture of psychological safety and ownership across the platform.
Technical Platform
- A construction insurance management system built on Elixir, OTP, Phoenix, LiveView, Surface and PostgreSQL
Umbra Search: African American Culture and History
As a solo developer, I worked with historians, archivists, researchers, and the arts community to create an award winning searchable website of over 800,000 items from more than 1,000 U.S. archives, libraries, and museums.
My goal is never to just write great software, it's to launch successful products. With Umbra Search I supported grant writing efforts with holistic feedback and technical writing. I met with focus groups and beta testers to identify core requirements. I even came up with the name for this project, "Umbra," while out on a run one afternoon. I bring this level of commitment and ownership to every project on which I work.
Technical Platform
- A custom data ingestion system (Ruby On Rails, Sidekiq, Node.js) that pulls and filters content from many library databases across the U.S.
- A search application built on the Blacklight Search platform (Ruby On Rails) and Apache Solr
- A custom thumbnail image caching service using AWS Lambda (Node.js) and CloudFront CDN
UMedia
I created a website to provide access to the University of Minnesota's 517 digital collections, 200k digitized items, and 2,654,590 digitized pages.
I also authored then released open source Ruby Bindings for the CONTENTdm API.
Technical Platform
- A custom Ruby On Rails and Apache Solr search application
- A custom thumbnail image caching service using AWS Lambda (Node.js) and CloudFront CDN
Minnesota Digital Library
I worked with Minitex IT staff and librarians to replatform the Minnesota Digital Library from CONTENTdm to the Ruby On Rails Blacklight search framework, backed by the CONTENTdm API (using the CONTENTdm API for Ruby Gem that I authored and open sourced) .
In order to support the Minitex Digital Library team as they developed and tested new features, I created a Docker-based local development flow for a single command platform setup process.
I also integrated the Minnesota Digital Library with the University of Minnesota Kaltura multimedia streaming platform.
Technical Platform
- A search application built on the Blacklight Search platform (Ruby On Rails) and Apache Solr
sportradar
At sportradar I focused initially on improving onboarding through documentation and small developer experience improvements, such as adding local docker development workflows to projects.
As a software engineer on the core platform team I took on responsibilities for extending applications like the NFL data processing platform and for upgrading and refactoring across the suite of applications. This work included assisting the DevOps team get applications ready for a massive infrastructure move to Kubernetes.
Technical Platform
- A large scale data processing microservices architecture powered by JRuby and RabbitMQ, among other technologies.
Campus Codefest
Born out of my conviction in the immense potential of greater cross-campus collaboration on software projects, I founded Campus Codefest. We brought together students and staff from across the University of Minnesota to work intensively together for two full days on projects of their choosing.
Campus Codefest became an annual tradition. Front line tech workers envisioned and created new systems, tools, and services together. Some projects took on new life outside the event but more importantly, Codefest broke down barriers between departments and inspired others to plan and hold their own events.