Hi, I‘m John.

Skills & Experience

I'm proficient with:

• Ruby & Rails,
• C#/ASP.NET Core,
• JavaScript, TypeScript & Node.js©
• Docker & Docker Compose,
• Kafka; RabbitMQ,
• Linux; PostgreSQL; Git & GitHub,
• Protocol buffers (protobuf); gRPC,
• React; HTML & CSS,
• AWS Lambda; IAM; Step Functions; EC2.

In my stint in Germany, worked with DeepL, the top AI translation company in the world. I left so I could move back to the US and build a family. There I:

• Led C# MVP for sharing glossaries, collaborating with stakeholders and very closely with product. Delivered feature well ahead of roadmap, providing a very valuable and highly-requested feature.
• Worked closely with Senior and Principal Engineers, delivering Glossary Generator, a pillar of the new corporate strategy, under tight deadlines.
• Universally appreciated colleague, creating deep connections and enabling my teammates wherever go. Lending my specific experience cross-team, pushing forward new topics for discussion and refining good team practices, setting up team rituals and fostering a close, collaborative environment. "The best code reviewer", "Doesn’t shy away from responsibility", "Celebrates success of team members", "I never felt this way about a colleague leaving".

Before I worked for DeepL, I worked as a software engineer at Prime Trust (now defunct), a fintech company building out the future of financial infrastructure, defined by digital assets. Some highlights of my time working at Prime Trust are:

• Integrated a complex system into a new ledger system with millions of transactions to help decrease costs by ~$70k per month.
• Improved business logic and leveraged SQL to save the company ~$50k per month in api calls.
• Researched and ran learning sessions for Docker & Docker Compose and Kafka.
• Set up Kafka and set up data pipelines between multiple services.
• Dockerified the monolith, saving all new onboardees valuable time with setting up their development environment, and pioneered the use of Docker in all future services with a fellow Senior Engineer.
• Created new Node.js services with express.js and nest.js, automating manual processes to be more accurate and efficient.
• Worked with Staff Engineers to set up inter-service authentication.
• Onboarded and mentored a new teammate, ran meetings, and created an optional and successful biweekly team social hour.

Before I worked for Prime Trust, I worked as a software engineer for Re:amaze by GoDaddy. At Re:amaze by GoDaddy, I've:

• Led the adoption of a new attachment backend in our Rails app;
• Created a new column in a database table with 118 million+ records and backfilled the values with minimal downtime;
• Spec'd out and built various APIs for integration with GoDaddy products, spearheaded migrating a massive monolithic Rails app from Rails 5 → 6, Designed and added drop-in encryption for sensitive fields in our database with full backward compatibility and no downtime;
• And more.

Before I worked at Re:amaze by GoDaddy, I built Maestro, an open-source easy-to-use framework for quickly bootstrapping and iterating upon serverless orchestration workflows with AWS Lambdas and AWS Step Functions.

If you want to know more about my experiences, see my resume at the bottom of this web page.

Maestro

The rise of serverless architectures and FaaS offerings such as AWS Lambda has revolutionized how companies are developing modern apps. The need for an orchestration layer over these architectures has brought about services such as AWS Step Functions. However, deploying apps that use Step Functions can be tedious and error-prone. Maestro prioritizes speed and developer productivity by automating this process so that the developer’s focus stays on developing their application's business logic.

Maestro is an open-source easy-to-use framework for quickly bootstrapping, deploying, and rapidly iterating serverless orchestration (hence the name) workflows and applications using Node.js® and AWS Step Functions.

Maestro makes it easy to get started developing serverless orchestration workflows. Plus, deploying is a breeze with Maestro. Since Maestro also offers frictionless teardown, re-deploying is as simple as tearing down and deploying again. Using Maestro aids development not only in the initial phase of a project but throughout maintaining and iterating on a project.