Founder January 2011 – Now

Ruby on Rails 3.x, JS, XSS, Solr, Memcached, Mongo, Amazon S3, AJAX, Git, Heroku, Postgres

Sqoot is a local deal tool that makes it easy for online publishers to engage & monetize their audiences. Sqoot's technology makes it easy to search tens of thousands of local deals.

• Cross Side Scripting: Sqoot features modules that inject HTML on 3rd party sites.
• Scale: Sqoot servers tens of thousands of pageviews per day.
• Data Normalization: Sqoot integrates with tens of deal providers, each with unique deal and tracking API calls.

Founder March 2009 – Now

Ruby on Rails 2.x, Amazon S3, AJAX, Git, Heroku, Postgres, TDD

PiggyBack.it was hinged on a simple concept: tracking money between friends is an awful experience. It seemed like a problem that software could fix. Initially it was designed to transfer money between friends in the most efficient way possible. After gathering some initial customer feedback, it morphed into a more simple debt tracker still used today by hundreds of people.

• Test Driven Balancing Algorithm: Using TDD I designed an algorithm to figure out how to balance money between multiple people in the most efficient way.
• Design & Marketing: I produced the logo, site design, and marketing video (http://bit.ly/rpIVYP).

Managing CSS & JS with Rack March 23rd, 2011

In most web apps, JS and CSS are a mess. There are few conventions when it comes to organizing these assets and modularizing them can introduce the HTTP overhead of multiple requests. In this talk, I discuss a new Rack-based approach to packaging assets using a lightweight gem called Stork. I cover organizational conventions, advanced CSS techniques with Sass, and simple ways to modularize your JS all while sending a tightly packaged set of assets to the browser.

• Stork source code: http://bit.ly/pkqTR4
• Accompanying blog post: http://bit.ly/oIQp0g
• Refresh Chicago video: http://bit.ly/r8oy0d
• Chicago Ruby User Group video: http://bit.ly/qRL03f

AJAX Form Validation for Rails May 6th, 2008

I presented at Chicago Ruby User Group, demonstrating an efficient solution to form validation with AJAX. The goal was to utilize exisiting server side validation logic to drive an interactive user experience.

• Accompanying blog post: http://bit.ly/pMrptp

Web 2.0 Graphics & Design November 2nd, 2007

Delivered a company-wide presentation at Clarity Consulting highlighting the benefits of proper XHTML and CSS, and demonstrating the principles of good web design.

• Video: http://bit.ly/ntZtWH

Technical Lead September 2008 – January 2010

Ruby on Rails, Sphinx, nginx, Virtualization, Amazon S3, AJAX, Git, Capistrano, MySQL, Scrum

Fave Media, a national video yellow pages and business directory, launched in 2007 and rapidly grew to be one of the major players in the small business online directory vertical. Their flagship product getfave.com drove 20 million requests a month in its prime. I came on board in September of 2008 leading and growing the team from two to five developers.

• Data Updates: Fave used an outside vendor for their 17+ million business listings. Every month this vendor published changesets affecting over 50% of that data. I oversaw the development of a project that fetched, analyzed and crunched these massive sets of changes.
• Process: Using Scrum methodologies, which I learned independently and from other peers, I built the team from two to five developers. We maintained weekly sprints, daily stand-ups and fostered a culture that promoted innovation.
• Highrise Integration: Fave brought in hundreds of new users and businesses every day. The challenge: empowering a team of sales representatives with this data. I took a “buy vs. build” approach to the problem and, working with the Highrise API, developed a solution that scaled to tens of thousands of leads.

Engineer February 2008 – September 2008

Ruby on Rails, C#, ASP.NET 2.0, PHP, ColdFusion, Flash, AJAX, ImageMagick, RMagick, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, JQuery, NHibernate, Subversion, Capistrano, MySQL, SQL Server

• Spex Chicago: I built this site entirely from scratch using Ruby on Rails 2.1. Working alongside a designer who favored JQuery as opposed to Prototype and Script.aculo.us, we were still able to accomplish elaborate visual animations and AJAX integration throughout the front end. The administrative interface, with which I had the opportunity to express much creative license, includes image size validation with ImageMagick and a clever customization of ActiveRecord.
• Northpoint Horizons: I had the opportunity to build this site from front to back with ASP.NET and C#. It features a Microsoft SQL Server back end that uses stored procedures to communicate to a custom data layer. Business objects, consuming that information, feed values to the user interface, which I also constructed from the ground up. Northpoint was another site that exercised my design abilities with a very graphic-heavy front end.

Engineer: Crate and Barrel – Point of Sale June, 2007 – February 2008

C#, .NET 2.0, Windows Forms, Web Services / SOAP, GDI+, Team Foundation Server, Visual SourceSafe

• Responsible for major functionality in a national rollout to all Crate and Barrel stores. Product enhancements include development of 8.5” x 11” receipts, a variety of transactional notes and changes to order maintenance functionality.
• Introduced a robust solution to allow furniture stores to print receipts onto 8.5” x 11” paper in addition to their existing Epson thermal printers.

Engineer: Echo Global Logistics – EDI Integration & Performance Tuning April, 2007 – June, 2007

C#, .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Services, SQL Server 2005, AJAX, GDI+, Subversion

• Responsible for an integration between shippers and suppliers that would update Echo’s existing web application with shipping status updates.
• Took action to improve performance across Echo’s infrastructure, which included SQL Server and ASP .NET profiling.