Overview

Seventeen years of professional software development experience; developing full stack web applications since 2004.

Experience

2011 – PRESENT

Good Measures LLC, Boston MA (Remote) – Senior Software Engineer

Full stack web developer responsible for architecting, designing, implementing, testing, and deploying the Good Measures software platform — a scalable, HIPAA compliant system for Registered Dietitians to coach people to better health.

Developed user-facing and internal web interfaces with Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Bootstrap, HTML (Haml) / CSS (Sass).
Championed API first development to simultaneously support Web, iPhone, Android, and 3rd party integration with the Good Measures platform. Closely worked mobile developers to specify, implement, version and document APIs.
Worked with Registered Dietitians and other internal users to shape product direction set priorities, design user interfaces, and conceptualize and implement clinical patient management and outreach.
Integrated platform with third party applications and data to automate workflows, expand platform capabilities and monitor system performance. Integrations included: Canvas LMS, Amazon (SQS, S3, Lambda), Urban Airship, APNS, Comfortable Mexican Sofa, Slack, National Provider Identifier Database, PaperTrail,, New Relic, and Trizetto.
Replaced JavaScript polling with ActionCable/Websockets to reduce web server load and improve site performance.
Developed Ansible playbooks, targeted for EC2 or Vagrant, for reliable automated infrastructure creation, scaling, and maintenance. Vagrant systems enabled mobile developers develop against local installations with minimal effort.
Automated browser testing using Selenium / RSpec / Capybara. Wrote model, integration, functional and integration tests enabling confidence in software upgrades and system changes.
Monitored and optimized site performance for better scaling, lower costs and improved user experience: optimized SQL queries, removed N+1 queries, added caching (fragments, query results, e-tags, etc) , optimized back end delayed job calculations, implemented capistrano deployment optimizations, tuned API performance with Rabl templates and JSON generation optimizations, and replaced Rails models with direct SQL queries.
Deployed and extended Hubot (a Slackbot) with EC2 integration and other capabilities (Node/Heroku) to automate operational tasks. Integrated Slack with AWS Autoscaling Notifications, PaperTrail queries, email delivery failures and other monitoring tools.
Mentored and coached development team members through code reviews, design reviews, and pair programming.

2004 – 2011

Varolii Corporation, Burlington MA – Principal Engineer, Team Lead

Principal Engineer and Team Lead for Varolii Profiles, a multi-tenant SaaS platform providing inbound and outbound employee and business continuity communications over phone, email, SMS and other transports. Varolii Profiles provided a Web UI and SOAP API for data management, decisioning, and reporting for time-critical mass communications.

Led requirements gathering, design and implementation of upcoming release layering finer grained security on top of existing customers applications and data while maintaining backwards compatibility.
Led requirements gathering, design, and implementation of Varolii Contact Manager which added efficient data integration capabilities and significantly lowered customer integration costs.
Led design and implementation of Varolii Message Center which added rich inbound communications, a unified web and phone interface and provided a rich administrator interface.
Implemented rich web user interfaces using AJAX, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
Implemented business logic, database access, Soap API additions, and framework improvements using C++ and SQL.
Developed UI infrastructure and standards that streamlined and standardized web development.
Developed an ASP.NET web application used internally by Customer Support and Operations to monitor site health, diagnose customer issues, and access log files.
Diagnosed and addressed performance and resource issues including: inefficient SQL queries, slow web page rendering, and memory leaks.
Represented Varolii at trade shows.

2000 – 2004

Quicksilver Technology, Seattle WA – Software Engineer

Developed software tools supporting hardware design and application development for the Adaptive Computing Machine — an integrated circuit for audio, video and wireless applications running on mobile devices. Primary technologies: Java, C/C++, assembly languages, and Verilog.

Developed software tools to support application development, debugging, and testing for software running on a custom hardware platform.
Implemented hardware simulator and assembly language for VLIW processor. Extended simulator to generate basic hardware representation used for chip synthesis.
Implemented build system to perform automated builds upon source control check-in.

Public Software Contributions

Repositories and Blogs

www.software-thoughts.com – My infrequently updated blog on software topics.

github.com/GoodMeasuresLLC/trizetto-api – Ruby gem for checking health insurance coverage.

github.com/johnnaegle/hubot-ec2 – Lists EC2 instances in Hubot / Slack.

github.com/GoodMeasuresLLC/inherited-attributes – Extends ancestry gem to allow attributes to be inherited.

github.com/GoodMeasuresLLC/activerecord-has_one_defaults – Provides defaults to has_one associations.

github.com/GoodMeasuresLLC/calendar_to_queue – Mountable endpoint for push notifications from Google Calendars.

github.com/johnnaegle/rails_weak_etags – Converts strong e-etags to weak to pass through nginx with gzip compression.

github.com/johnnaegle/jquery-visibility-rails – Provides the jQuery visibility library as a gem.

Sample Pull Requests

github.com/rack/rack/pull/814 – Fixed a bug with Rack and open file counts.

github.com/Apipie/apipie-rails/pull/524 – Have ApiPie generate documentation for delete request parameters.

github.com/Apipie/apipie-rails/pull/521 – Fix bug with API documentation generation

github.com/stve/silencer/pull/15 – Made log silencer thread safe in Rails 4.2.6+

github.com/comfy/comfortable-mexican-sofa/pull/639 – Fixed asset URL generation when CMS is not mounted at root

github.com/saml-idp/saml_idp/pull/59 – Fix invalid SAML generation.

github.com/saml-idp/saml_idp/pull/64 – Rails 4 upgrade change.

github.com/atomicjolt/omniauth-canvas/pull/3 – Documentation and Usage

github.com/snikch/jquery.dirtyforms/pull/76 – Fix dirty form checking in JavaScript focus events

github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job/pull/689 – Fixed test failures under Rails 4.2.0.beta1

github.com/grocer/grocer/pull/39 – Fail APNS push notifications if the payload is too large

github.com/anthonator/dirigible/pull/14 – Made parameters optional in Urban Airship API Wrapper

github.com/rails/rails/issues/9351 – (bug report) Rails 3.2 issue with millisecond differences in timestamps.

Education

University of Washington, Seattle WA – Masters of Computer Science, 2004.

University of Washington, Seattle WA – Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering, Mathematics Minor, 2000.

Other Interests

Running, camping, hiking, taekwondo, photography, and cycling.