60-06 43rd Ave. Apt 1D - Woodside, NY 11377 - 734.239.2303
I am looking for a role as tech lead, or a senior engineering role with management prospects.
Greenhouse Software produces a suite of SaaS products for to facilitate businesses' hiring processes. The main stack is based on Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, served from AWS. The following is a sample of some of the work I did there:
Newgrounds is an entertainment portal built on the LAMP stack, serving user-submitted games and animated shorts. Newgrounds is a high-traffic site with over one million registered users, and thus requires scalable code and diligent attention to database efficiency. My major projects there included:
LectureTools is a web-based learning tool used in large university lecture halls to improve student participation and understanding. Students can view lecture slides, ask question, respond to instructor questions, and even take notes, all through the web application. The instructors, on the other hand, have tools to graph student responses over time (to things such as multiple choice questions) and track student attendance. I was hired to rewrite the existing site from scratch in the Symfony framework, implementing new features such as a Web 2.0 interface using AJAX and a Flash-based file uploader. I also built the base CSS stylesheet, though both the CSS and the HTML templates have been modified by the client.
I completed the bulk of a dual degree in physics and mathematics at Drexel University. I worked for 4 months in 1999 as an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory, assisting in research on quantum computing.
The last non-freelance job I had in the IT industry, prior to Newgrounds, was back in 2000 at Destiny Web Solutions in Conshohocken, PA. I was a Principal Developer, designing and implementing web applications in Java and Perl for financial institutions, including Chase Manhattan, Fleet Financial Group, and Northern Trust. Destiny is no longer in business.
In the time between leaving Destiny and starting my freelance career, I did many things that I found very interesting that had nothing to do with web development, including building a cabin from scratch out of salvaged wood and found materials, and living in it for two years. This was great.