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Professional Biography/Expanded Resume

Skills​

Rust, C#, Typescript, Go, React/NextJS, NodeJS, PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, AlpineJS, REST

Amis Pharmacy Corporation, Principal Engineer 2013-2018​

This was my first job working as a programmer professionally. A small owner of a local pharmacy hired myself and a close friend to build out a patient management/drug dispensing software for him. Since we had little real world experience, we mostly arbitrarily picked C#/WinForms and MSSQL server as our technology to develop with.

This job gave us a lot of great experience as a crash course into professional work. We learned how to gather requirements from the client/owner, and interfaced with a quite a few third party vendors. We serialized prescriptions into an obscure EHR format to file claims with insurance companies like Medi-Cal and Aetna; serialized/deserialized prescriptions to xml in order to receieve or make requests from Surescripts, which required passing a Surescripts audit before being admitted to their network; setup automations to integrate a drug information database from MediSpan on a weekly schedule; learned to use SQL databases in general, initially starting with MSSQL server, but eventually transitioning to Postgres; and learned how to use the Entity Framework ORM. I also built a small expressjs node server to handle communication with surescripts.

Unfortunately, we did not learn much in terms of modern tech stacks as WinForms was so old at the time that even it's successor WPF itself had already been deprecated! We also mostly ignored modern web technologies, the end result was we basically created a huge, local desktop monolith software. Initially the code was a mess, we built all of our logic right into the frontend, but eventually learned the power isolating domain logic from the technology stack so we could start introducing unit tests. Despite how ugly the whole thing was, we deployed our software into 4 store fronts which ran the owner's pharmacies for a few years.

Our deployment method was also awful, I basically created a small desktop application for the pharmacy employees which essentially made a call to git to pull in updated code. IIRC, we also committed our binaries and DLLs to the git repo, so that the git pull updated the software. We had some sort of make-shift database migration script to update the tables when things needed to be changed, but we worked really hard to avoid changing the schema (you can probably imagine why)! Every pharmacy had postgres installed on a computer within the LAN which acted as the server for the rest of the clients to interface with; every software client invoked the database directly.

It was about as scrappy as you could get, but overall I'd say I learned a lot of good foundational knowledge at this job. Stuff like the Single Responsibility Principle, (In fact, I read Clean Code at this time, which really changed the way I think about code in general), mocking services, and the importance of unit testing. I also learned a great deal of what not to do when developing software. Eventually the project was cancelled when we realized the DEA would charge us 50k per year to maintain certification for prescribing controlled substances, which was a deal breaker for a pharmacy chain which was barely making ends meet as it was.

CitizenNet/CondeNast, Frontend Engineer, 2019-2021​

It took me a year to find my next job, and during this time off, I became quite obsessed with functional programming after dealing with the onslaught of constant bugs we dealt with at the pharmacy. I ended up learning and falling in love with Haskell, one of the toughest languages in existance out in the wild, and this eventually prepared me for a job at CitizenNet, where they were using Purescript, a haskell derivative, to develop frontends for their advertisement platform.

This was my first experience working on a larger dev team, which featured about 30 developers working on various backend and frontend services. We mostly worked remote, and we used JIRA to track tickets and progress. We had daily stand-ups on zoom to discuss upcoming work, and biweekly sprint-planning meetings. It was my first time being exposed to RESTful web apis, using json to communicate with the backend, and being exposed to Kubernetes (k8s). Every developer used an AWS EC2 instance to host their own dev environment (mysql database, backend, and frontend) with minikube as the k8s controller (IMO, this was a huge waste of money...) My understanding of k8s was quite weak at that time, but it was a nice introduction to it.

I eventually became the lead frontend developer for the Audience Studio team, where I collaborated with a few other backend developers. My job basically entailed building out new UI routes, and creating new controls/widgets on Purescript-Ocelot, CitizenNet's open source frontend library. I also trained a support engineer in Purescript, and he eventually joined me as part of the frontend team. Lastly, I also got to implement some cool charts using d3. It was great to learn REST and get true frontend experience under my belt, but the job got old quickly. I also didn't care much for the mission of the company, so I eventually left to join a company which I felt had a better purpose.

Tomorrow's Talent, CTO 2021-Current​

This is actually a company my father-in-law started. I had been helping him on the side during my time at CitizenNet with getting a basic website setup so he could start interfacing with clients. This is much less of an engineering role and more of a general IT role. This company deals in education, bridging the gap between schools and employers. I've watched the company grow from a 4 man team to now over 16 employees! I helped setup all of the infrastructure we currently use, such as our corporate email account and phone system via google workspace, google chat for day to day communications, and Monday.com as our CRM and project management tool. Besides this, my work has mainly entailed assessing software systems to see what best suits our needs, and aid with onboarding our team to these systems. I've had the chance to dive a bit into google app scripts, writing some simple functionality extensions to google forms and google calendar. Probably the most productive engineering-wise experience I've gained from this position has been working on some internal R&D projects.

I recently learned rust while developing an internal student-tracking system. It uses the rocket.rs web framework to run an api server and to host a simpler frontend with AlpineJS. I've also gotten a much better handle of using Kubernetes as well. I recently deployed a 2 node cluster consisting of a raspberry pi 4 and an intel n-100 mini pc which hosts a number of services I use to aid with development of this system, services such as: Hashicorp Vault, Cert-Manager, Woodpecker CI, Keycloak, and OpenFGA. I haven't gotten much use out of the CI server yet, but it's been fun to implement google sign-in via keycloak and handling fine grained authz via openfga; I definitely learned a lot about authentication and authorization through this process. I also had my first experience interfacing with GraphQL when I wrote a small web-hook integration between Monday.com and Mailchimp, which I deployed on AWS Lambda.

Conclusion

Anyways, that's a bit of a deeper dive into my past work experiences! I hope this helps to create a better picture of who I am and what I'm capable of. A lot of my experience has been really scrappy, but I'm proud that I've always able to dive into these new situations and find "good-enough" solutions to tackle our problems.