I am the Engineering Director in charge of the projects surrounding Business Operations: Financial Data, accounting, Inter-business-unit operations, core data management, and business health reporting. I am still very hands on as far as the code, but I spend a lot of time helping teams find the right architectural solutions to complex problems with a large number of stakeholders.

Engineering Director

Lincoln, Nebraska I currently work at Hudl as the Lead Software Engineer in charge of the technical quality of projects surrounding billing and operations. Our team builds the tools and workflows that enable us to scale and improve Hudl's operations.

Lead Software Engineer

 As the head of the DevOps team and Platform team liaison I was responsible for
managing the team that built our immutable, codified infrastructure at AWS. Managed
a team of 7 people across database, systems administration,and DevOps development.
Oversaw relationships with IT vendors and managed, projected and maintained the
budget for the entire cloud environment. Worked closely with the Information Security
team to achieve excellent results in the most recent external audit. Spoke at the 2015
AWS Compliance Summit for the Financial Services Sector on behalf of Dwolla on the
topic of cloud infrastructure and regulatory compliance. I was also responsible for
reviewing, selecting and interviewing potential candidates for the developer team. 

DevOps Team Lead/Head of Infrastructure

Helped to develop and expand our internal accounting system. Currently working on features for government. We are moving to a more service oriented approach by pulling out more and more of our core into micro services. These new services have begun my discovery of Scala (our language of choice for new services) and Thrift as a communication mechanism. Working with tons of great tools and strengthening the polyglot side of my knowledge base by adding C#, Python, Ruby, and Scala. Working with a true Test Driven Development process and paired programming have also expanded my view of what approaches can drive code quality even after more than 9 years of experience in programming.

Software Engineer

I managed the eFarm Forms Generation team which is responsible for producing, arranging, storing and delivering the completed documents (often pdfs) that are output from new policies, renewals and endorsements. We work with the front-end team as they provide the data we consume to produce the documents as well as with the Agribusiness Technology group which assists with Quality Control, testing, and specification verification. We also work closely with the Research and Development group which is actually responsible for the creation and maintenance of specifications. In addition, to the management side I am still the lead and active developer on the project as well. Other than that, I am also responsible for maintaining and managing several other applications which are complete and not currently in active development.

Programmer Analyst II

I was responsible for approximately 17 applications during this 5 year time- period. The applications span a wide range of team-sizes, application sizes as well as relative states of completion. Nine of these applications were created from scratch. Eight of those nine were web applications in which we wrote all the front-end UI code as well as all the back-end business logic. Five of the nine were applications that I designed and implemented with no other team members. In addition to application development I assisted in interviewing potential candidates for developer positions starting around 2009. Dataset Builder - 5/2007 IT Roadmap 8/2007 Commission Schedule Entry 9/2007 Workflow Production Reports 10/2007 Agri-Auto Policy Issuance (Applications, Summaries) 11/2007 - 9/2008+ Agri Pending Bound Business Report 1/2008 Policy Holder Payments 5/29/2008-10/2008 Conflict of Interest (Hard Copy Entry, Review Application) 6/2008-10/2008 Coverage Analyzer 8/2008-3/2009 Conflict Of Interest (Workflows/Policy Reconciliation) 3/2009-6/2009 Commission Schedule Entry(Workflows/Policy Reconciliation) 3/2009-6/2009 Coverage Analyzer 7/2009-6/2010 Quoting Tools rewrites (Coverage Comparison, Policy & Coverage Illustrator, Coverage) 5/2010-8/2010 eFarm Print Team Lead- Agri-Auto (Policy Issuance & Application), Farm Owners (Policy Issuance & Application), Night Manager 6/2010-present Conflict Of Interest Redirect System 11/2010 Packet Mailing Improvement Project 11/2010-12/2010 Conflict of Interest Master Control Data Viewer 1/2011-2/2011 ACH Verification Process 5/2011-7/2011 Vipp Forms Deployment/Management Process Creation/Training = 1/2012-6/2012 Source Allies Inc.

Programmer Analyst I

Worked on both in house development projects as well as contracted to work for Iowa Foundation for Medical Care (IFMC). Worked on a large web application that stored and collect medical information.

While my experiences have driven me towards the stance that languages are just another tool in the toolbox I have always enjoyed many aspects of JavaScript. I have really enjoyed the advancements in recent years around ES6+ and strive to find ways to incorporate any of these pieces into my day-to-day development.  I am a fan of breaking out complexity and designing for mobile-first. I have appreciated the rigor added over the past several years in terms of testing, build pipelines, and layered architecture. I strive to keep up-to-date with the latest tools, but still apply a base of software engineering as a craft, and focus heavily on appropriate testing, quality, clean code, and continuous refactoring. 

Java was my first language and I have written many projects with many different surrounding technologies. Related technology expertise in Spring came along side it as it was used in many of the projects I worked on over the years. While I have branched to a more polyglot approach over the past 6 years, Java and Groovy still have a near and dear place in my heart.

My software experience covers the full stack from the very bottom in low level infrastructure building robust cloud-based stacks in AWS, up the chain to the front-end using React/Redux and all the latest tools. I have always had a strong interest in software engineering as a craft and focus heavily on appropriate testing, quality, clean code, and continuous refactoring.

My front-end experience has grown over the years along with the maturity of the front-end environment. I am a fan of breaking out complexity and designing for mobile-first. I have appreciated the rigor added over the past several years in terms of testing, build pipelines, and layered architecture. I strive to keep up-to-date with the latest tools, but still apply a base of  software engineering as a craft, and focus heavily on appropriate testing, quality, clean code, and continuous refactoring. 

Software engineering is a craft. I focus heavily on testing (using TDD whenever appropriate), clean/quality code at all levels, and continuous refactoring 

Daniel Shaefer

Protect our core systems from 3rd party products' downtime, improve the performance of our system to aid in seemless user interactions.

This project was essentially the addition of proper fault tolerance for 3rd party systems combined with a robust caching implementation. This included building a caching layer for our most called endpoints and a strong invalidation strategy tied to both internal actions as well as 3rd party webhooks. The final outcome was performance improvements from 5000x upward. It also got 99.98% of all calls to our cluster to under 1 second. In addition, we lowered the number of outgoing API calls to 3rd party provides by millions. When the last three downtime events occurred they went completely unnoticed by both internal and external users. 

Personal details

Daniel S.

Summary

Technical skills

Work Experience

Personal Projects