- Designed and managed the development of a Java-based system to allow over 100,000 insurance brokers and dealers to produce their own insurance quotes over the Internet. The system includes advanced features such as database-driven rule-based client-side input validation (dynamic rule engine), a context-sensitive animated help character, and much more.
- Managed a team of developers, including hiring and firing. Reported directly to the CIO.
- Designed and developed Store Explorer, the company’s flagship B2B and B2C Java-based e-commerce product. Store Explorer went on to win “Best of Show, Commerce” at Internet World Spring 2001 in Los Angeles.
- Store Explorer produced an 80% higher shopper conversion rate when it was installed at the website of a large clothing retailer. Furthermore, Store Explorer generated sales that averaged 30% higher than those that originated from the company’s existing website.
- Managed the company’s technical staff, including development, quality assurance, and technical documentation.
- Sat on the company’s board of directors, co-authored the company’s business plan, and participated heavily in raising venture financing. Delivered numerous sales, venture financing, and press presentations in front of groups as large as 500.
- Cycle 23 was contracted by both Manugistics, Inc. and Factory Logic, Inc. to work on their respective supply chain management and MRP tools. Managed the software development on these projects, including the design and construction of a Tibco-based document management subsystem.
- Designed and developed a high-performance, high-reliability system for extracting plain text from various common file formats (PDF, DOC, XLS, etc.). The system was part of a commercial software offering used to process extremely high volumes of email attachments at financial institutions. The system was written in Java and used a distributed/clustered approach to meet strenuous scalability and reliability requirements.
- Designed and developed a J2EE-based vehicle configurator – a system that allows users to pick and choose vehicle options while enforcing manufacturers’ rules constraining those choices. The system is similar in concept to a chess-playing program in that it solves extremely complex logic paths while trying to optimize for the best solution (in this case, the lowest cost). The algorithm is founded on a constraint-based optimization rule engine (designed by me), and is several orders of magnitude faster than the existing system. The configurator system was deployed as an XML / SOAP based web service.
- The configurator is a key element of www.autobytel.com. This site experiences very high traffic volumes. As a result, the configurator system was designed to scale well across many machines in Autobytel’s server farm. This problem is especially difficult because vehicle configuration is a computationally intense problem.
- Managed the development staff for the configurator project.
- Created appropriate documentation for the configurator, including UML diagrams, XML schemas, technical specification documents, and more.
- Brought in to turn around a large-scale software development project gone awry. At the time of my hire, the development team operated in a chaotic manner, due primarily to lack of planning. Feature creep and developer goldplating were also common problems. In the first few months, I instituted a number of industry standard rapid development practices such as automated nightly builds, automated unit testing, proper design and development documentation, and more. The result has been vastly improved product reliability, much better visibility into the development process by senior management, increased customer satisfaction, and much tighter adherence to the development schedule.
- Managed the development of numerous client-facing portals, including approximately 50 dealer websites. Directly responsible for the hardware and network infrastructure to host all of these sites.
- Conceived several new software product offerings and managed their successful construction and rollout. One of these products (a large-scale, Java-based CRM solution) was directly responsible for growing the company’s install base by 25% in less than two months.
- Managed all aspects of software development, including hiring and firing, hardware purchases, and some offshore outsourcing.
- Designed and developed a cryptographic mechanism in Java for managing users’ credentials within the firm’s “P8” Enterprise Content Management system.
- Solely responsible for the design and hands-on initial development of all of the company’s software and systems, including a distributed, Java-based crawler and a custom, Java-based CRM system using Struts, Hibernate, and MySQL.
- Successfully managed offshore development and maintenance.
- Led the development team, ensuring on-time delivery and quality.
- Extremely rapid development using the Salesforce Force.com SaaS platform and its Apex language. Backend system built with Java on Linux. Web services interconnectivity between Force.com and Java servers built with Amazon SQS. Large-scale data storage built with Amazon S3.
- Determined CRM business requirements and translated into a functional and technical design, ultimately resulting in a hugely successful implementation.
- Architecture included distributed processing across clusters to provide for high-capacity, high-availability crawling of infringing websites, perhaps best summarized as a “MapReduce” architecture, similar to Hadoop.
- Designed a self-service customer portal using Force.com to enable customer certification of UDRP actions; a feature that won us many accounts over our competition.
- Design and extremely rapid development of TwoStaves‘ flagship product – a Salesforce-based development tool to enable rapid language translation of hard-coded English Visualforce pages. The first two customers of the tool are both Fortune 500 firms, rapidly enabling tens of thousands of users to use hundreds of custom Visualforce pages in another language. The user interface for the tool is built with Visualforce using more advanced technologies like Bootstrap, JavaScript, and CSS – rather than the standard Visualforce look-and-feel.
- Designed and built Lightning components (Aura) for use in both Lightning communities and Lightning Out scenarios.
- Also designed and built a Salesforce-based legal document assembly product, allowing complex legal documents to be assembled easily within the Force.com platform.
- Designed and developed a full-blown interpreter for a custom scripting language that runs within Apex, allowing expressions and scripts to be stored in a database field and evaluated on the fly (otherwise not possible with the Force.com platform).
