Currently contracted to NASA as a member of the core development team on the Cumulus project (https://github.com/nasa/cumulus), which is an open source project aimed at making NASA's Earth Science Data fully open and accessible to all.

Data Engineer

Directed the Cloud Operations team (distributed/remote) responsible for running SpliceMachine’s HTAP database product in AWS and Azure.

Cloud Manager

Designed and implemented client solutions using the Amelia Cognitive Agent platform to automate business processes in various domains. Focused heavily on integrating the platform via Mule ESB (Amelia V2) and Apache Camel (Amelia V3) as well as improving development quality and workflow productivity.

* Designed/developed Chat DSL (Groovy), and tool to auto-generate TestNG test classes from Chat DSL files
* Designed/developed Apache Camel component extensions (HTTP, Mail, Spring Test) that significantly decreased integration development time and improved performance.
* Created Maven Archetype to instantly manifest Gradle projects for Amelia Camel HTTP integrations
* Created Groovy DSL for name resolution and code completion for implicit service variables in IntelliJ IDEA
* Improved Amelia’s intent understanding via utterance training/classification
* Integrated Amelia with Slack via Python using Slack’s Real Time Messaging API
* Participated in initial development of Amelia SDK in Go
* Member of Cognitive Organization’s "JEDI Council" for defining/evangelizing organizational best practices
* Mentored engineers on development best practices (Groovy/Java, Python, Git, Maven/Gradle, Camel)

Senior Solutions Engineer

Focused on automation for Application Lifecycle Management of E-Commerce applications in order to bring about greater application stability and robustness, and to support shorter release cycles for all 3 J.Crew brands: J.Crew (http://www.jcrew.com), J.Crew Factory (http://www.jcrewfactory.com), and Madewell (http://www.madewell.com).

Conceived our initiative for Building Better Quality (BBQ) into our (unofficial) "DevOps" team, and continue to lead (hands-on) the effort, where we have achieved the following:

* Implemented zero-downtime application deployments via application versioning and clustering
* Enabled daytime deployments to Production through a number of optimizations, including build-time resource optimization
* Reduced Production deployment time by 50-75%
* Improved QA confidence by implementing environment-independent build artifacts
* Introduced Ansible for reliable, repeatable, automated configuration management
* Helped champion consistent, repeatable, automated, self-service development environment provisioning (conceived and implemented by a team member during a J.Crew IT Hackathon in Summer 2015, which won Best Hack award)
* Reduced the code-deploy-test-code development workflow by roughly 95% (from ~5 min. to ~15 sec.)
* Push-button application deployment coupled with automatic data/schema migration
* Conceived and led design and development of task automation triggered via JIRA issue workflow (dubbed Flowbot, which was conceived for the J.Crew IT Hackathon in December 2015, and won Best Hack award) 

Architect, E-Commerce

Participated in J. Crew project for upgrading infrastructure for website and call center, including upgrades of OS (Solaris to Linux), Oracle , WebLogic (8.1 to 10.3.0), and Blue Martini (9.0.3 to 10.2.2). Focused on code migration/upgrade and streamlining build and deployment processes.

Helped implement Collins Booksellers website (Australia) on hybris platform version 4.4, including integration with PayPal Express Checkout for payment and SeekMedia for fulfillment.

Led deployment of Blue Martini Relationship Marketing at Woolworths Australia, which involved installing and debugging Relationship Marketing on Websphere, as well as creating several dialogs for Woolworths Big W and Dick Smith Electronics, including birthday offer, lapsed customer, abandoned cart, etc.

Helped deploy Contiigo’s loyalty CRM application to Amazon Web Services.

Continually mentor Contiigo’s internal development team on best practice’s for Java development.

Senior Consultant

Responsible for all technology within the organization, including both the physical infrastructure, as well as software development. Focused on rebuilding the flagging infrastructure to ensure that it was robust, secure, and scalable, including such systems as the electrical system, network, servers, phone system, backup, disaster recovery, site security cameras, and requisite tools for effective monitoring and management of such systems.

Regarding software, focused on upgrading outdated systems from the O/S up through the applications, again ensuring robustness, security, and scalability, along with interoperability. Conducted project for bringing in Google Apps Premier for internal collaboration, communication, general productivity improvements, and off-loading some of the technical burden from our small IT department.

IT Director

Managed offshore team responsible for development of our CRM application, integration between Blue Martini suite and Order Management System, and development of web services layer. Also responsible for defining and maintaining development conventions and build processes, mentoring other team members, implementing tools to improve productivity and enable test-driven development, and code reviews.

Functional Architect

As Senior and Principal Consultant (for Blue Martini, Professional Services Organization), and Senior Field Engineer (for Field Engineering), acted as technical lead during design and development of various e-commerce projects throughout U.S., Europe, and Asia for clients such as Virgin Wines (UK), Debenham’s (UK), Computacenter (UK), Lufthansa Worldshop (Germany), Chartered Semiconductor (Singapore), Metcash (Australia), PetSmart (US), and Fred Meyer Alaska (US).

Tools/Technologies: Java, JavaServer Pages, JSP Tag Libraries, Servlets, WebLogic Application Server, Microsoft SQLServer, Oracle RDBMS; various Open Source tools for building applications, static code analysis, byte code enhancement, code generation, unit testing, etc. (Ant, Maven, XDoclet, Checkstyle, PMD, AspectJ, JUnit, TestNG, Cactus, Velocity, Jelly); CVS, Subversion, VSS, PVCS.

* Employee of the Quarter Award, 2002 Q2, PSO Asia-Pacific Region: Received for outstanding client work: Chief architect and developer of effort to optimize unacceptably poor data loading, staging, and publishing performance. By redesigning the data architecture, data volumes were reduced by 97%, leading to a 94% reduction in execution time (from weeks to hours). In addition, provided a means to guarantee data integrity during synchronization between legacy systems and the Blue Martini system.

* Appreciate the Martini Award, 2000 Q4: Received in appreciation for the conception, design, and development of a Blue Martini domain-level GUI debugger, which became heavily used on a number of projects, not only as the primary means for debugging, but also as a means for learning the inner workings of the Blue Martini system. Still used and distributed with application suite.

Senior and Principal Consultant

I've used Python for various scripting tasks throughout my career. I've also used it for a Flask application that allowed my team to integrate Jira with a content management system in order to automate certain repetitive tasks that were previously prone to human error.

More recently, I've been using Python on NASA projects enabling scientists to analyze Earth-Observation data (typically satellite imagery).

While I've been in contact with JavaScript for about 20 years, I've only been seriously using it more recently in the context of a NASA project that is hosted on AWS and is written primarily for Node.js.

I've been using AWS in the context of deploying data ingestion pipelines.

I've used Java since its early days, for clients across the globe, primarily focused on e-commerce applications using J2EE technologies, such as Servlets, JSP Pages, JSP Tags, among others. Clients have included Virgin Wines (England), Lufthansa (Germany), Metcash (Australia), PetSmart (USA), and others.

I'm also experienced with various testing frameworks, such as JUnit and TestNG, static code analysis tools, such as FindBugs, PMD, and Checkstyle, and build tools, such as Maven and Gradle, as well as packaging and deployment practices related to Application Servers.

Leveraged Groovy in the process of customizing an AI-based Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) platform for various clients. Groovy was the scripting language of choice for custom BPM logic. Also used Groovy for writing custom Apache Camel components in the context of integrating the IVA with other systems.

Personal details

Charles D.

Summary

Technical skills

Work Experience