Bio

Software Engineer, USMC Combat Veteran, small business owner.

I am a professional Full-Stack Software Engineer, a former Marine (Infantry - 0311) and a 4X combat veteran. I served two tours in Iraq ('03 and '05) and two tours in Afghanistan ('03 and '04). After my service, I used the G.I. Bill to earn a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Boston (2013) and I was a lead Software Developer at CABEM Technologies, LLC from 2015-2019.

I founded Alpha Terrace, LLC in March of 2020. Alpha Terrace is a Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) which focuses on federal, state and local technical contracting projects.

Professional CV

Work Experience

Owner - Alpha Terrace LLC

March 2020 - Present

Oversee day-to-day operations. Responsible for the general direction and focus of the company.
Developing business processes. Some of these processes include Agile development, risk management, Earned Value Management, invoicing, hiring, HR policy, records keeping and company branding.
Writing responses to RFPs and ROIs. I am the primary communicator to contract administrators and customer management personnel.
Primary project manager and a senior developer for most of our projects.

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Software Professional - Dept. of Defense (DCMA)

October 2019 - June 2020

Obtained extensive training in the federal acquisition process.
Conducted software surveillance on a $2 billion dollar project. Some of these activities included metrics and Earned Value reporting, risk management and monitoring, and participating in an integrated product team (IPT).
Trained in Six Sigma quality management, lean process methodologies and their practicality in the software development process. Six Sigma yellow belt certified by the Dept. of Defense.

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Project Manager - CABEM Technologies LLC

June 2015 - July 2019

Organized weekly scrum meetings with the development team. Oversaw two-week development sprints with regular production releases.
Gathered requirements directly from the customer and translated those into technical specifications.
Wrote quotes for new features, including time and cost estimates.
Regularly checked current work progress against the approved budget for the project or feature being worked on. Most importantly, communicated early and often with the customer about the project status and keeping them updated on any potential changes in scope or budget needs.
Weekly updates to the management team on the status of the Kansas State and Competency Manager projects that I oversaw.
Produced monthly projections of expected billings based on future scheduled work and historical data.
Regularly proposed new features and projects to current customers to gain more billable work as well as improve the customers current product. My proposed features and projects were often successful and provided CABEM more revenue and opportunities.
Guided newly hired developers through the onboarding process. This included everything from gathering HR information and explaining benefits to setting up development environments.
Assisted in the hiring of new employees. I used Indeed and ZipRecruiter to find potential new developers, along with referrals. I was the one to initially contact the candidate and do the first interview and technical skills screening, after which I would make a recommendation to the CTO as to whether we should move forward with the interview process.
Acted as the “lead of the lead” developers. Essentially, I organized monthly meetings among the other lead developers in the company and led them through meetings where we would discuss business processes, potential risks and opportunities for ongoing projects, and the overall climate and health of their prospective teams. I would then report the results of these meetings to CABEM senior management.

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Lead Software Developer - CABEM Technologies LLC

Febraury 2014 - July 2019

Original software developer of CABEM’s Competency Manager. I built the front-end mostly in ReactJS, plain JavaScript and Bootstrap 4. Backend is PHP. Backed by a MySQL database and served on Apache webserver. The application also has an API, which I developed using Slim 2.0 for the backend and Swagger for the front-end and documentation.
Lead software developer of a Kansas State EPA funded web application. The application is designed for recording and reporting on Brownfields data. This includes an integration with the EPA's main data system (ACRES) via their REST API, which was developed specifically for integration with our application. This data is used by the EPA to report to congress annually. The application is built in HTML, JavaScript, jQuery and Bootstrap 4 on the front-end (with a little ReactJS recently added). PHP and MySQL on the backend, served with Apache webserver. Website is fully responsive, optimizing and resizing the pages depending on the device being used to view them.
Used Ansible to automate build processes and deployments to production and test environments hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Worked on an identity theft application which focuses on things such as credit score monitoring, Driver’s License and SSN monitoring, sex offender alerts and several other features (+1 million users).

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Software Developer Intern - Selventa

June 2012 - September 2013

Worked closely with senior engineers to solve problems surrounding the OpenBEL framework and internal Selventa software solutions.
Enhancements to the OpenBEL framework, an open source project from Selventa.
Researched and recorded benchmarks for NOSQL graph-based database solutions.
Wrote Python modules to automate the parsing, building, the changelog, and update process for the BEL Namespace and Equivalence files for BEL v.2.0.

Infantryman and Recruiting/Retention NCO at the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army

June 2002 - June 2009

USMC Infantryman. Team leader and squad leader.
US Army Recruiting and Retention NCO.
Deployed 4 times in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom as a member of the US Marine Corps.
Developed skills such as strong work ethic, teamwork, maximum productivity, leadership, and of course the ability to follow orders to a great degree of precision.
Recruited, motivated, and helped to retain future soldiers for the U.S. Army.
Worked within very diverse groups of people, and as a public figure in the community always had to adhere to a high standard of moral behavior.