Russell
zimzat (a@t) zimzat (d.ot) comSoftware Engineer & Architect; Specialist of PHP, MySQL, & JavaScript
Experienced software engineer specializing in web application & API backend development using PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux, & JavaScript with over 18 years of experience.
Pragmatic, efficient, effective, consistent, conscientious, motivated, and continually improving.
I am looking for a Remote position as a Senior or Staff Software Engineer in Full Time or Contract employment. My ideal work would involve a role that contributes to society as a whole, such as a open-source, non-profit, education, or government project, or being involved in game development. My state of residence for employment purposes is Maryland.
I enjoy playing co-op/PvE video games, a variety of strategy board and card games, and reading Science Fiction and Fantasy stories.
Experience
- Promenade Group –
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Staff Software Engineer
Technology: PHP 8.3, AWS Aurora MySQL, JavaScript + TypeScript, Vue.JS, ElasticSearch, AWS, Git, Linux
- Project Admission –
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As the CTO of an early startup I covered a range of technical roles as the application was designed, developed, and scaled from scratch to production.
- Collaborated with the cofounders to determine client expectations, system requirements, and build complexity.
- Worked with Business and Product to determine change requirements, level of effort, and task prioritization.
- Setup and manage the initial staging and production infrastructure using various AWS services to support load balancing, routing, certificates, secrets, and deployment processes.
- Architected, bootstrapped, and iterated on the application using Vagrant/Ansible, Symfony, GraphQL, and VueJS with a focus on ease of development, consistency, security, and efficiency.
- Interview, hire, mentor, and create day-to-day processes for additional engineering team members as company grew.
- StageBloc / Fullscreen Direct –
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- Analyzed performance with XDebug and KCachegrind, benchmarked bottlenecks, and implemented strategies for increasing web and queue request throughput.
- Collaborated with Frontend and other API consumers to ensure application could meet their needs.
- Regularly provided in-depth code reviews, best practices, and testing as part of development and release processes.
- Created dynamic page component API and rendering system to allow users to create custom site displays.
- Options Away –
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- Worked with Customer Service Representatives to build an administration interface based on their needs for handling issues when they occur, making relevant information easily accessible, and providing simple interfaces. Developed using an Angular frontend and PHP REST-based API backend.
- Worked with Business to determine data & interface requirements and team members to implement changes in new & existing systems with a upgrade path for refactoring legacy systems.
- Mentored Junior developers in best practices, design patterns, and system architecture.
- Implemented uniform and transparent development environment using Vagrant to quicken the setup process for new developers.
- Streamlined release process, including database changes, to a single command for any environment.
- Disney Technology Solutions and Services –
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Worked with project manager and fellow developers to determine customer requirements and increase quality of existing software. Implemented interfaces based on customer prototype designs and feature requirements.
- Modernized localization string lookup service.
- Created content management and environment elevation flows using Git branching.
- Moved to create modular OOP JavaScript using RequireJS.
- Wrote development and service engineer productivity tools.
- Streamlined page templating and localization processes.
- IPC, project contracting –
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Freelance project based contracting. Projects vary from script debugging, to feature implementation, to stand-alone application development. Workflow consists of specification review or definition, quote, development, client review, and publication. Projects included:
- Inventory Management & Distribution Interface – Product Inventory, External Sync, ACL, Stored Locations
- Photo Gallery – Gallery Management, Thumbnail Creation, Multi-Picture Zip Download
- Tuition Calculator – WYSIWYG Formula Editor
- Volunteer/Donation Event Organizer – Event Creation, Time Overlap Validation, Assigned Event Administrators
- PDF Layout Generator – Layout Definition, Element & User Input Placement
- Feed Moderation Interface – Feed Parsing, Visual Accept/Deny Processing, User Helper, Feed Output
- Survey Interface – Question & Answer Admin, File Attachments, Result Aggregation
- FedEx Shipping Label API – Form Input, SOAP API, PDF Return
- Product Search Database – CSV Import, Full-Text Search, Keyword Override
- Gay City Health Project
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Worked with the project stakeholders to determine software requirements and best way of implementing without reinventing the wheel. Created a public-facing portal to select available free slots in their existing Google Calendar scheduling backend. The Gay City Reservations project source code can be found on Github.
Technology: PHP 5.3, Git, Google Calendar API
- Accretive Technology Group –
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Worked with stakeholders to determine requirements, team members to ensure quality of delivered work, and researched and designed new systems.
- Identified and help fix security issues
- Researched and implemented performance improvements
- Researched and fixed edge-case and difficult to identify issues
- Analyzed code base for translation readiness and cataloged potential issues
- Proposed new methods for handling user application, processing, and review.
- Lexis Nexus –
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Provided guidance and expertise to redevelop an internal application and brief existing developers on PHP capabilities. Worked with team, managers, and supporting groups to establish PHP, MySQL, & JavaScript standards. Acted as technical lead and project designer. Interviewed potential employees using position-objective criteria and provided feedback to management.
- Implement ground-up project design and code structure using Zend Framework
- Create dynamic form layout to data structure interface
- Create Cron Jobs, Web Service API interfaces, and developer tools
- Advise architects and developers on PHP, MySQL, & JavaScript best practices
- Create standards for PHP, MySQL, & JavaScript for group and architects
- Helped create job expectations and interview materials
- Interviewed potential employees via phone and in-person, providing position-relative feedback to management.
- Selling Source / FiTech –
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Worked as part of a team to maintain and update an agent interface to manage loans, including automated processes handling verification, funding, billing, and collections. Helped visualize the decision engine flow, reduce code duplication, and streamline report creation and updates. Worked with fellow developers to divide workloads and with client to assess bugs and features.
- Developed in PHP 5 using Object Oriented designs, focusing on Dependency Injection supported patterns for testability.
- Created and managed cronjobs for back-end processing of automated tasks, including remote file retrieval and processing (CSV, XML, etc), account processing, and customer email alerts.
- Created new functionality with dynamic interfaces using ExtJS 1.1, including AJAX-like calls with JSON for data, on top of existing interfaces.
- Created developer tools to speed up debugging and development, including log aggregation, graphs using GraphViz for decision engine logic.
- Regularly managed multiple backlog tasks as well as taking point for new priority issues and defects.
- Worked with Project Managers in creating specifications for new tasks and reviewing existing specifications and implementations.
- Worked with other developers to estimate level of effort and scope involved for new issues.
- Worked with other developers to review code and test modified functionality.
- Kept track of on-going issues across developers to quickly assess incoming defects and report on expected delivery to client.
- Used Subversion to manage multiple on-going tasks and merge issues between development, QA, RC, and production branches.
- Pushed code to multiple Linux-based servers in a load-balanced environment.
- Worked with DBAs to assess, optimize, and update multiple instances of MySQL databases.
- Gallery, Google Summer of Code Student –
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Worked with developers of an open-source Gallery management project to implement an action notification system as part of a Google-sponsored student mentoring program.
Technology: PHP 4, MySQL 4, HTML, SVN, Linux, Apache
- Imperial Kingdoms –
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Space exploration, expansion, exploitation, and exterminate game based on a retired game called Xenocide3001. Contained logic for handling resources, research, production, combat, and numerous other aspects. Used a themable front-end. The original game was written in Java and no code access was available during development.
The code has been released and can be found on GitHub.- Clone of an abandoned web-based game called Xenocide 3001.
- Reverse-engineered without access to the original source.
- Created in PHP 4 using basic class functionality for MVC type organization.
- Used the Smarty template system to separate display and back-end logic. Allowed for multiple styles to be easily switched.
- Simulated real-time action by calculating all changes since last action.
- PDI Comic –
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Created an interface to display comics by date and allow author to upload new comics and news using a simple interface.
- Develop and maintain a web-comic management system for the writer and artist.
- Used a multi-user administrative interface for comic and news management.