- Word Version
- Redmond, WA (Seattle, WA Metro)
- Blog: https://compositecode.blog/ - Contact me
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adron/
CTC - Owner/Consultant February 2023 - Present | Redmond, WA - Remote
Clients Include: Tata Communications, Kaleyra, PNC Bank, Vaco, Incedo, and others.
- Spam-mitigation API Service, written in Java Spring Boot, that provided an out of band processing to occur to filter SMS messages for spam and also processing for validity of UDF/Data Type, and encoding & decoding of message formats. Utilizing AWS w/ Terraform, Github Actions, and other respective services for deployment, testing, environment management, and monitoring/observability of service execution. (More details)
- Architecture, design, and prototyping of Data Fabric Platform (More details) buy/build technologies for modernization of APIs. This involves working across teams and customers in financial organizations to ensure design elements meet requirements of data consumers and management capabilities of the respective organization, while ensuring ROI is met and measured.
- Setting up groups within the organization around Communities of Practice. Specifically GraphQL Community of Practice and Java Spring Boot Community of Practice. (More details)
- Where necessary implementing vertical application stacks for reference and prototyping with horizontal infrastructure as code assets for scaling, resiliency, deployment, management, and ongoing iterative development of Java Spring Boot based APIs via containerized (Docker/K8s) with continuous deployment.
- Planning, organizing, and mentoring where needed for a wide array of data sources including Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, and other data source options as necessary.
- Hiring and building teams for multiple projects centered around financial organizations application API modernization (going from X tech to RESTful & GraphQL APIs, custom resolvers, etc).
- Leading multiple projects for teams; including scoping, identifying statement of work, user experience outcomes desired, initial product planning, building the right team with right hard and soft skills, and aligning them with the mission at hand.
- Advocating technical solutions across teams internally through a Community of Practice for GraphQL (and related technologies). Grew the community from a small dozen to over 60 people in just a couple of weeks. Community is now going to exceed 80 members by our 4th month! For internal growth this is an excellent growth path among the data teams!
- Created and built out some internal corporate training focused around deployment solutions & plans using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) based on immutable infrastructure concepts.
Tooling: Java, Spring Boot, Mongo, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Apache Cassandra, Kafka, Flink, and many others.
Hasura - Full Time April 2022 - February 2023 | Seattle, WA - Remote
Check out the work @ Hasura for the data source connections here > https://hasura.io/graphql/database/
- I rejoined Hasura to become a starting member of a new product management team. I worked to help the team move from a lack of process, to a more process focused product practice. I led and contributed to discussions around customers, use case, design decisions, and product clearing the path and leading engineering for new feature and capabilities development.
- In addition to the product specific roles I worked with engineering to streamline the flow and practice of the engineering process too. This included synchronizing tooling of Productboard and JIRA between engineering and the product team. With the tooling synchronized and an agreed upon work flow we were able to shift gears, improve communication, and push forward new feature development in a more consistent, quality, and clear path form inception, ideation, development, and "done".
From a tactical level several key features were released under my helm:
Tooling: Haskell, Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Amazon Athena, Snowflake, and numerous other technologies for integration and architectural guidance.
Amazon Web Services - Full Time November 2021 - April 2022 | Seattle, WA - Remote
60% of time writing, researching, and producing data analysis and information around AppSync, Amplify and related developer use. Including coding of production level CI/CD and related examples of the systems in use, schema modeling, and web site architecture and deployment.
40% Production of documentation, articles, and written details related to developer usage of Amplify, AppSync, GraphQL, data infrastructure, DynamoDB, and other key AWS Services related to these specific services.
A post I wrote @ AWS, "How to connect your GraphQL to AWS data sources".
*Tooling: JavaScript,
Hasura - Full Time September 2020 - October 2021 | Seattle, WA - Remote
30% of time - working on reference, prototyping, and development of application usage around GraphQL APIs using Hasura. Involving JavaScript, Go, Python, and other languages stacks and their utilization of GraphQL as the communication medium between application and API/data services.
30% of time - Provided presentations, reports, analysis, and training on using GraphQL, architectural design of systems using GraphQL.
20% of time - DevOps guidance, patterns and practices, around deployment, maintenance, and architecture use of Hasura and GraphQL API data services.
20% of time - Leading communications between customers, community, and internal product and engineering as needed. Organizing and leading efforts on video production of Hasura streaming shows (Hasura Coding & Hasura Data & APIs Shows).
Blog Post @ Hasura are here. Videos @ Hasura with "A Hasura Bit" video shorts here as an example of a video series I put together from content, audio, video, animations, and more.
DataStax - Full Time Seattle, WA - Remote
Principal Cloud Architect during December 2019 - August 2020
90% Providing architectural plans (design), guidance (team leadership & coordination), and implementation (coding) of DataStax's Apache Cassandra DBaaS. My main area of focus has been on GraphQL API implementation, reference application guidance, technical content, and leading efforts around prospective customer and user outreach for these services.
10% Providing support around architectural design and implementation needs with K8s, Docker, Go, and other tooling used for DBaaS deployment and related customer/user tooling for the DBaaS and onsite Apache Cassandra/DataStax Enterprise implementations.
Principal Developer Advocate during June 2018 - December 2019
Worked with the team on a number of key advocacy projects for DataStax:
- Build out, expansion of material, and presentation of reference application designs and guides for building large scale (often microservice based) enterprise applications using the killrvideo code base. Used the repos with Java, C#, Node.js, and Python for use in presentation, teaching, mentoring, and related outreach.
- Started, led, and organized various meetups in Seattle region around regular presentations, but also around teaching database and data-centric development topics around data modeling, architecture, and related design and coding.
- Regular technical content blogging, and other content creation, around open source projects, contributions to open source projects, and related events with the software programming/language communities.
- Led efforts to start live-stream coding on Twitch. This led to me starting a YouTube & Twitch channel to share coding sessions, building and contributing to open source, and other involvement around various Apache Cassandra, data, data management, and related focuses. This expanded into a wide range of streaming around Go, C#, JavaScript/Node.js, Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise, distributed system, Terraform, operational and development related (i.e. DevOps) projects and lots more besides just coding.
Written Articles/Blog Entries: https://www.datastax.com/our-people/adron-hall Multi-cloud Challenges w/ Adron Hall & Patrick McFadin: https://www.datastax.com/resources/video/multi-cloud-challenges-adron-hall-and-patrick-mcfadin A fun guest appearance on The Open Source Show: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/the-open-source-show/distributed-systems-demystified-cassandra-datastax-demo-and-faq
Principal Software Engineer November 2016 - November 2017 | Seattle, WA - Remote
Projects @ Pelo.Tech
- Led the effort to rebuild the company site and bring together community building efforts around development efforts, language stacks, and related outreach.
- Mentored other developers as they worked to ramp up on various projects that the company was leading across multiple e-commerce and IoT device companies.
- Led BDR efforts to expand outreach in the Seattle area in relation to our development services, product offerings that underly our unique development services, and related capabilities.Projects: 1. Led the effort to rebuild the company site and bring together community building efforts around Pelotech development efforts, language stacks, and related outreach. 2. Mentored other developers as they worked to ramp up on various projects that the company was leading across multiple e-commerce and IoT device companies. 3. Led BDR efforts to expand outreach in the Seattle area in relation to our development services, product offerings that underly our unique development services, and related capabilities.
Projects helping startups initiate their first technical hires, team hiring, and further build out.
I've pushed businesses forward using lean startup approaches, focused on quality, user experience, and putting together teams of people (coders, graphic design, user experience, and other roles) that can get products built and deployed with the capabilities and features needed. Offering & routinely providing hands on initial coding, prototyping, and related work for startups moving toward MVP and v1 of their offering.
The approach I take has been technology neutral. However there have been some that are routinely called for including; Go, Node.js, and JavaScript for multi-tier web development (React).
Home Depot - Full Time Orchards, WA - Hybrid
For a good idea of what I worked on during my time at Home Depot check out the following blog entries:
- https://compositecode.blog/2016/01/26/all-that-tech-sitrep-elastic-meetup-and-quote-center-updates/
- https://compositecode.blog/2015/10/31/after-816-days-im-taking-a-job/
A few high points: Researching the cultural changes and characteristics for building an effective organization around open source development. Determining what is and what won't work for the team specifically. Implementing techniques and ideas around pushing code from a close source development practice to an open source development practice. I also presented in October on this specifically at O'Reilly Architecture Conference in London, and have slides and information here: https://compositecode.blog/confs-meetups-events/moving-enterprise-practices-and-development-to-open-source/
Technology high points: Terraform, Packer, Golang, Node.js/JavaScript, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, Distributed Systems, etc. Migration from an OpenStack Platform to Google Cloud Platform, Architectural Changes from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling cloud architectures and more.
Contract Work March 2012 - August 2015 | Portland, OR - Remote
Projects at CDK (May 2015 - August 2015)
At CDK I led two teams; one team of interns and on mid-level and senior devs on two distinct efforts.
- Build out, navigate CDK's internal infrastructure, and determine was is needed to deploy a push notification server.
- Lead an effort among interns and staff for the challenge series. This involved determining use case, product fit, and options for deployment of various applications CDK teams could use internally.
Projects at Code Fellows (Feburary 2015 - April 2015)
I worked with Code Fellows to start up the Portland branch of the Code Fellows School. During this time I worked as the initial instructor with a team opening up the office and providing the first multi-week long training sessions.
The sessions were based on core web development skills needed to attain a junior level development position. This included the standard trio of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with a further dive into various frameworks, libraries, and other tooling one would work with to build out various sites.
Supporting courses included Git, IDEs, and related curriculum and materials to round out the student's education.
Project at New Relic (March 2012-November 2014)
NOTE: This work was done while also running a startup (see Deconstructed below), since we both had numerous parallels and teamed up to do that work.
Working with New Relic I've produced a number of individual and series of blog articles (http://blog.newrelic.com/) based around Platform as a Service (PaaS) Technologies, Node.js Applications and deployments and a number of other various topics.
With the articles I've written for New Relic there have been a number of others for related publications that I've written in conjunction with New Relic. These publications include; Mashable, Silicon Angle, Read, Write, Web, and others. Links to those articles can be found here: https://compositecode.blog/write-up-series/my-work-elsewhere/
Tier 2 + New Relic - worked on integration and data collection of APM tooling, with their teams to integrate with PAAS environments like Cloud Foundry. Worked with New Relic & Basho for tooling integration around the Riak distributed database and the New Relic APM tooling.
Projects at Basho (December 2012 - August 2013)
Responsible for partnership reconnoitering, assisting on sales calls, working with partnership integration at New Relic and others. Handled all community organizing, conference organization and outreach in the Pacific Northwest (Cascadia Region). The user groups I formed and managed included two key groups: Seattle & Portland Basho & Riak User Groups
I also attended, spoke at and provided training at a number of conferences and user groups throughout the United States.
Coding & development of vertical integration projects along with other horizontally scaled integration projects. From a tactical perspective integration involved JavaScript (Node.js), Ruby (on Rails, Sinatra or other variances), middleman for documentation, .NET and other languages working with Riak. Assisted customers with horizontal and vertical architecture around networking, security and other requirements to implement Riak, Riak with Redis, Neo4j, Postgres and other various technologies to provide highly available, scalable, high performance, resilient distributed data systems for application development.
Projects at Tier 3 (March 2012 - November 2012)
I joined Tier 3 in March to lead the Web Fabric PaaS Team, expand the Iron Foundry Community and push forward the Thor Projects.
The initial release of the Tier 3 Web Fabric was deployed in May. After the release I have focused primarily around advocacy, community leadership around the Iron Foundry Open Source Software Projects and initiating, building and leading the team that is coding the Thor Project as a UI for Cloud Foundry PaaS Environments.
In addition to these efforts I also routinely speak at user groups, keynotes, or other groups and lead community efforts around mentoring, teaching and expanding programming practice and knowledge in several cities including Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and generally anywhere I can get to and organize events.
Project Iron Foundry, Organization Coder & Community Lead from (November 2012 - February 2013)
Working with the open source community and the Tier 3 team to enable Cloud Foundry for .NET.
Deconstructed November 2013 - February 2015 | Portland, OR
I led a team that built a regionally distributed, load balanced multi-instance, auto-scaling engine that takes consociated profile data from multiple devices and builds core individual profiles for query. Included in that is a simple business rules engine that takes those queries and processes those elements of the profile to take action for sales, marketing, systemic, or related processing of the data and post-processing actions.
- 70% of time: The core technology has been centered on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using their respective services: Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, EC2, S3, RDS, Route 53, Identity & Access Management, and SQS. The system built on these AWS services was a core engine and multiple processor services for the engine all built with Node.js 0.10.x. This was done as an easy move from no product to MVP/prototype with the easy ability to drop components of the design and move them to stacks that might be more applicable to their particular use (such as Erlang for distributed processing, Java for more complex and mature business rules, etc). However at no point did we find any weakness or necessity to move anything from JavaScript on Node.js into another language or stack.
- 20% of time: I spent an additional amount of time working with contracts, agreements, and within the open source community determining technology needs, who would best meet requirements we needed for specific tasks and keeping this all within a budget.
- 10% of time: Speaking with, to, and for the community in regard to the product, the technology we'd been developing in and working toward the next stage of company development.
Russell Investments November 2010 - January 2012 | Seattle, WA
Working on Enterprise Systems & related architecture to bridge data from many inbound sources to create cohesive information and reporting displays for traders, accountants, and others within the company.
Other Projects Include: Training & mentoring provided for various tools within our team such as Git, Visual Studio, Unit Testing, TDD, and more. Consulting on enterprise high availability solutions, opportunities within the company for existing architecture, and where our future paths lead around these goals. Coding within teams using TDD/BDD pair programming techniques. High communication, high velocity, high quality development with proactive burn down and charting to provide management with insight to remove barriers to development.
Currently we use a plethora of open source tooling and work with multiple frameworks. The primary production deployed frameworks are centered around .NET and Windows Server Technology, however our team works daily on new ways that push the barriers, regularly with technology outside of the Microsoft Stack such as; node.js, Javascript Libraries, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, and many others. If it can help us move our technology utilization forward, the team takes a look at it.
Logic20/20 May 2010 - November 2010 | Seattle, WA
Worked as technical lead for 3 Windows Azure White Papers and Cloud Computing. Provided analysis, implementation, and deployment for Windows Azure Storage & Role Usage for demo projects used for training, enterprise environments, and more.
Provided technical architecture for deployed internal ASP.NET MVC Support Site Projects for prototype of Customer Support Portals using map reduction queries against "big data" systems (100+GB in each system), internal support analysis results, and other mechanisms with JavaScript/jQuery utilizing AJAX/Asynchronous calls. i.e. Today’s current SPA or Single Page Applications.
Webtrends October 2007 - April 2010 | Portland, OR
(65%) Primary role included integration between WebTrends application and SSAS (Analysis Services) utilizing SSIS (Integration Services) and other proprietary tools. Data warehouses & databases ranged from hundreds of thousands to millions of row tables between a couple hundred MBs to several TBs of storage. (25%) I developed applications utilizing SSIS, SSAS, and .NET Framework (Web & Windows Forms) to assist in application integrations and data troubleshooting. (10%) I created arrangement and coordination of project work and planning including deployment planning and implementation.
Once completing work with the web services team at Webtrends I rolled over to Webtrends Consulting Solutions & Services Team to do implementations with those services. I provide development integration & implementation support for Adobe AIR, Flash, .NET, Silverlight, WPF, Office 2k7 & 2k3 (a LOT of Excel) and more products that utilize our Webtrends Data Exchange and Collection Services. In addition to the tactical involvement the strategic involvement of Enterprise Governance around analytics, business intelligence, and social media into full spectrum custom intelligence dashboard and scorecard solutions for customers.
This role also has involvement with client communications before, during, and after sales process to assure clients know the full scale and scope of the product capabilities. I often work to coordinate, provide guidance, and consulting to sales, marketing, engineering and other teams as need be to provide successful customer engagements and integrations.
I've also provided leadership in gaining key partners and the respective partner integrations, implementation of integration solutions, and the direction of these partnership efforts from development, relationships, and cost analysis and benefit.
Contract Work January 2001 - September 2008 | Portland, OR | Convington, LA | Jacksonville, FL | Tacoma, WA | Memphis, TN
Labor Ready - Acted as IC for development (C#, Java, & prototyping) and also later as team lead for multiple teams.
Instant Media - Build ASP.NET (C#) based web app & components necessary for large media uploads (video) along with infrastructure and related assets.
Corillian - I worked with a team on several projects (C# + XML based platform) for credit union and bank clients. Including Travel to & from clients.
Micro-Power Electronics - Designed/Architected a Quote Management System with Integration into Goldmine CRM (SQL Server) and Fourth Shift Manufacturing(SQL Server) Software Package. I built this solution using ASP.NET Web Application with SQL Server Back end. Utilizing OLAP and OLTP solutions for this.
Citi HR Solutions - I worked with custom server controls to simplify the development of SQL Server data driven applications. Lots of OOP/OOD around C# and Microsoft App Blocks. Significant time training and mentoring junior developers.
Fidelity - I created an internal request management web app with integration into Fidelity’s Security Authenticator. Completed all Database Architecture Design, App Architecture Design, Work Cases (UML Visio), and OOP.
Allstate - OLAP Cube ETL Coder/Data Pipelines - Created OLAP Warehouse feeds utilizing DTS for ETL Processes feeding primary Cubes.
Bank of America - Worked as lead developer on data entry application process enhancements. Led 6 sigma team.
SCP Distributors/ Superior Pool Products - I worked on a team on "Purchasing Console Application" building w/ SQL Server 2000 using ASP.NET/IIS 5.0 to develop a web front end.
Caesars Entertainment, Inc. - Develop and streamline the Change Management reporting flow and management system.
Cmedia - Primary function was Sr Systems & Database Administrator and lead developer on multiple Projects.
Lockheed Martin (w/ Nasa, Naval Research Lab, Naval Oceanographic Office) - Full Time October 1999 - August 2001 | Stennis Space Center, MS
Provided technical support under two contracts focused around data collection and storage from sensor data on vertical and horizontal rocket tests, including positional (i.e. like GPS) data and it's respective storage and reporting.
Provided y2k mitigation & management of systems hardware and networking. Including appliances replacement, discovery, and patching or analysis and replacementwhen necessary.
2004 Grade: A - Finished top 1% of class.
Activities and societies: Worked within the training group as team lead, assisting with accelerating our class team into the lead position within competitions.Activities and societies: Worked within the training group as team lead, assisting with accelerating our class team into the lead position within competitions.
Attended multiple weeks of Greenbelt Training in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Associates, Computer Science 1996-1999 Grade: A - 3.7 GPA - there is a cool story behind this too. Activities & societies: Attained the status of "Who's Who" in final year of college.
N/A, Computer Science 1996-1998
Activities and societies: I audited computer science classes for 2 years at LSU. This included attending, and working with computer science materials, programming, and related work. I primarily did this, to gain experience but also to help the faculty on various educational endeavors and increasing InfoSec materials in the course work. This was done via invitations from fellow students and faculty who were interested in leveling up some of the security elements of the courses.
Regularly attended 2600 Meetup & worked with infosec groups on penetration testing, physical and network security for DOD, SPR, and infrastructure related assets.