Waypoints Along My Career

I was ‘Modea’s man in Durham’, working ‘embedded’ at Duke as part of the Blacksburg, VA based team that manages the Duke Health System’s main web site, www.dukehealth.org. This site is the main marketing gateway to the Duke Health System, is built on Drupal 7 with AngularJS and Solr using Agile development techniques.

Duties include: Being the main Drupal design and development resource, external data integration to the site, working with Duke to deploy new versions, working ‘Agile’ly with the team on new features, debugging and fixing problems with the site (Drupal, AngularJS, and/or Solr related), setting up and managing the Continuous Integration environment, working with SEO analysts to meet their needs, improving and documenting processes and the like.

Main Drupal technical resource, developer, site infrastructure architect and technical support for Longsight's Drupal clients. Additional duties included creating detailed estimates for clients, maintaining application level security, assisting in responding to RFP and other business development, documenting processes, dev ops site creation for Drupal sites, and mentoring for others with less Drupal knowledge.

Some major projects that I have lead and been the primary developer have been:

• Ground up design and implementation of a student portal that let 40+ content editors dealing with 100+ school, department, cohort, campus, and other areas connect to 3500+ students. Automatically, importing and managing the students via Banner exports and assigning them to appropriate areas of content so they only see 'news' that relates to them.
• Conversion of this site to a Demo site for marketing, conference kiosk use (trydrupal.longsight.com)
• Transitioning hosting and application support of a major college's main campus website and alumni site from another vendor to Longsight. This included some major security updates, quickly learning the extensive existing custom code and related processes (with minimum documentation), and a full site 'overhaul' to support a new responsive site layout with many changes needed for it to be come rated as accessible. Refactoring various parts of the site to allow the college personnel to have more control over their content.
• Picked up development needs for an 'open source document' library site that required support for 6 'site interface' languages and many other languages for document meta data.
• Site infrastructure design for a college converting from ContentM to Drupal. This included some major migration coding to transfer data out of ContentM (a very Ajax based site) to Drupal and having a security structure that allowed.30+ content management areas to be maintained by different content editors.

Team lead, main architect, developer, and last call support for the client facing group that supplied the technology used by Duke CE in it's educational programs. Additional duties included assisting in business development efforts, cost estimations, application level client security reviews, working with IT group to ensure systems were available 24x7, documentation, and training others.

Some major projects that I have lead and been the primary developer have been:

• The Duke CE Signature Coaching Solutions platform (Drupal)
• Performance Tuning Drupal and MySQL servers
• An Identity Management System to support cross site users
• The current Drupal based multi-site management system and templates (PhP, Drupal on Apache).
• The Push to Publish system (J2EE on Tomcat)
• The Web Application Component System (J2EE on Tomcat)
• An Account Creation System to quickly create client user ids.
• The Duke Learning Platform (nee Pensare P3->P4 nee DEEP) (J2EE on Netscape Application Server)

Some business outcome of these projects where: Signature Coaching Solutions is now a new line of business with a growing revenue stream. The majority of the others have been to add functionality and support increasing client demand without increasing technical staff.

Robin's Nest Designs is an online Needlework store run by my wife. As such, I have been involved in everything related to small business operations, everything from the technical side with stuff like site design and general tech support to helping calculate ROI on marketing campaigns.

I was part of a team dedicated to researching existing tools and developing new ones to support Business Education. While there I was the co-architect for the Duke Enterprise Education Platform (DEEP) which was a Java based web platform to enhance and replace the GEMBA program's static web presence.

Technology transfer team member when the DEEP platform was "sold" to Pensare, Inc. and re-built as the Pensare P3 platform.

Responsible for staff of 3 which supported the Fuqua School of Business's diverse infrastructure. This included the school wide Novell network, an IBM Mainframe, various Unix systems, providing technical support for researcher, E-mail, Web, and other services.

Duties included budgeting, personnel searches, liaison between IT staff and the school, and being hands on across all areas of the school's infrastructure.