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Founder, OpenMeet — the free, open-source alternative to Meetup | Principal Software Engineer

Founder at OpenMeet

Louisville, Kentucky, United States
  • Solution Architecture
  • Go-to-Market Strategy
  • NestJS

I've been building software for 25 years—everything from Linux kernel code to enterprise SaaS to a community events platform I'm running today. My career hasn't followed a straight line: I left college in '99 and co-founded a web design company that sold to a local ISP. I've built out company infrastructure in three datacenters from bare racks to production. I took a four-year break to run a farm, then came back to ship features to 10,000+ enterprise customers at VMware.

What's consistent is that I solve problems with code. I wrote about 2,000 lines that unlocked over a billion dollars in government contracts. I helped grow a professional services org from $422M to nearly $1B. Now I'm building OpenMeet, an open-source alternative to Meetup, because community groups shouldn't get priced out by private equity.

I'm most effective as a hands-on engineer who can navigate across teams and translate business problems into working software. I like building things that matter with people who care.

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Career13

OpenMeet is an open-source, locality-aware platform that helps people create meaningful community connections through secure event planning and coordination, prioritizing user privacy and data autonomy while making it easy to organize everything from neighborhood gatherings to institutional events.

Lead technical pre-sales discussions and integrations. Develop fixes and features for a Go lang based baremetal deployment and automation platform. Quickly onboard and deep dive into the product and its source to improve time to value. Stepping away to take some personal time.

* My team was chartered with improving customer outcomes by speeding up development of product features that had become blocked by technical limitations or cross organizational friction. * Identified 15 high value product gaps ($5M+) that BU Engineering could not address, but for which customer demand was high, and made steps to close the gaps. * Researched (code diving, interviews) and estimated complex software delivery timelines with incomplete knowledge. * Guided discussions between Product Managers, Engineering, Product BU leadership, Client Executives and Customers to gain consensus on engineering objectives, what product features would land in, and funding amounts. * Dropped into very large code bases and implemented features addressing product gaps, created documentation, created and ran demos with customers and staff, on through production delivery. * Notable features delivered: * implement Azure Government Cloud support for VMware vRealize Cloud SaaS, a kubernetes cluster running ~60 services, opening an opportunity to bid on US government cloud contracts that had been blocked.. * develop vRealize construct to export/import infrastructure config, driving adoption of cloud SaaS and contributing to a $5M revenue boost. * Mentored and coached 3 team members, fostering their professional development and helping them achieve their goals. * Coach team hygiene, ensuring standup runs smoothly, and members remain block free; manage blocks within my reach.

* This set of roles was consultative in nature for the World Wide Professional Services organization of ~3000 members. * Delivered impactful presentations at conferences and organized external speakers for internal talks, contributing to knowledge sharing and thought leadership within the organization. * Assisted large organizations in improving DevOps practices through training, mentoring, and the implementation of best practices, resulting in increased productivity, faster time-to-market, and enhanced efficiency. * Frequently created demos and labs for communicating emerging tech, for example a lab I developed to raise blockchain nodes, and walk through the software design lifecycle for distributed, web 3.0, apps was used to train sales on the life of a developer in the blockchain world.. * Led internal bench-time development efforts of ~20 other consultants. * Brought DevOps, containers and container orchestration capabilities to the VMware PSO, and upskilled hundreds of consultants with microservice development training. * Researched emerging technologies, such as blockchain, holistic data orchestration patterns, modern applications, IoT and analytics, compute edge and developed training materials for consulting and sales staff. DevOps transformations, development and architecture of Cloud Native Apps, automation of software deployments, making life better. - evangelize and facilitate devops transformations in client companies with market caps up to $35B - contributor to open source products inside company and for clients - residencies facilitating rapid deployment of micro-architecture stacks - develop REST interface to packerd for container builds, AAS - accepted into the CTO Ambassador program which allows direct influence of company leadership across field and R&D

- Consult on software automation and deployment - Puppet certification - Conversion ~30 projects from ant to maven - Deployment automation and service orchestration via Capistrano - Make delivery to production less stressful, more repeatable, and fixable via code vs release notes - Company purchased by VMware

- Manage small team - Institute linux server configuration management via puppet and git - Run intrusion detection against internal and external networks. - Embrace the cloud! Manage cloud environment at RackSpace, Redhat Enterprise Virtualization, Ovirt, libvirt, and KVM. - Automate monitoring via nagios, zenoss, ganglia, munin, and custom scripts - Develop packaged, distributable development environment via vagrant and puppet that allows developers ability to test against same virtual environment that production runs in. - Identified and remedied lag in http access by deploying memcached. - Encourage savings by automating cloud server deploy/destroy cycle during busy/idle periods. - Identify inefficent use of 10GB storage network and implement network tuning to improve. - Pass knowledge on via wiki, hands on sessions, and anecdotal emails documenting troubleshooting processes.

We raise - free-range, happy chickens for eggs, live sales, and meat - sheep for wool, meat, and pasture management - bees for honey, wax, and fun - chemical free vegetables - black walnuts - garlic - Turned fallow 30 acre farm into an active chemical-free farm producing eggs, chickens for breeding, USDA inspected chicken meat, a large variety of vegetables, and winter greens production. - Developed markets with local grocery, restaurants and bakeries. - Made direct sales via Farmers' markets in Louisville, including one winter market, and delivery to Louisville. - Managed the St. Andrew Farmers' Market. - Developing sheep flock for wool and meat sales. - Planning to add pigs for meat next year.

Develop managed home network device. Responsible for full OS, build management, automation of deployments and hardware management. General go-to guy.

Education1

University of Kentucky

Education

1996 - 1998

Skills57

Other

Amazon Web Services (AWS)AnsibleAutomationawkAwkBashCc languageC++ LanguageChickensCloud ComputingCommunicationComputer HardwareData CentersDevOpsDistributed SystemsDocker ProductsEggsEnterprise ArchitectureFarmsFirewallsGitGo-to-Market StrategyGrepIntegrationJavaKubernetesLinuxLinux System AdministrationMicroservicesNestJSNetwork ArchitectureNetwork SecurityNetworkingOpenSSHOperating SystemsOrganic FarmingPeople ManagementPerlProcess AutomationPython (Programming Language)RsyncRubySecuritysedSedShell ScriptingSoftware DevelopmentSoftware EngineeringSolution ArchitectureSpring BootSystem DeploymentTCP/IPTerraformTroubleshootingUnixVirtualization

Credentials1

puppet

Pearson VUE

Publications1

Languages1

English