Experience

Lightsmith Consulting LLC, 2009 - present

Agile coach / Trainer / Facilitator

I work with & coach teams that want to be more lean & agile; I run developer & product owner training; and I lead story mapping workshops.

My clients & engagements range in size / scope from short, targeted training for companies like Nike to several month coaching contracts for smaller companies. They include:

Agile Coach, Client: Vertafore, Insurance Company

As Vertafore enters its third year of Agile adoption, I am responsible for introducing Developer Practices such as TDD, pair programming, refactoring, etc across their 360 group containing over 40 developers. This includes mentoring developers, coaching scrum masters, providing feedback to teams, & leading workshops.

Agile Coach / Advisor, Client: Kiha, Startup

As Kiha grows, they bring me in periodically to give them feedback and guidance on their process. I help them with things like planning approaches & strategies for scaling agile.

Instructor, Client: Startup Weekend

I designed & teach intensive Rails & iPhone courses that I'm helping to roll out across many of the 60+ cities that host Startup Weekends yearly.

Instructor, Client: University of Washington, extension

I designed & taught a 10 week Ruby on Rails course which uses group and project work to teach students the popular web framework and agile development.

Senior Developer, Client: SerialsSolutions

I worked on the Rails frontend for a next generation library search service. I implemented Saved Items functionality, made many enhancements to the UI, and helped tailor their process.

Barking Minds, 2010 - present

Founder

I created Barking Minds as a vehicle to help freelancers come together to create beautiful software mainly targeting Mac, iPhone, and iPad platforms. To date, we've shipped 1 product, with more on the way. We employ a variety of technologies (rails, objective-c, etc), and use Agile & Lean to streamline our development. My contributions are organizational, and acting as both a product owner and developer on multiple projects.

Pivotal Labs, 2007 - 2009

Pivotal provides on-demand project teams for well funded web 2.0 startups. My responsibilities at Pivotal included Project Management, Agile Coaching of development teams, and Ruby on Rails development. I also introduced the practice of Agile Inceptions to the company, which they have instituted before the start of every project.

Client Principal / Lead, Client: Knowledge Management Company

I managed client relationship and led one of Pivotal's largest development teams (12 devs) to create a site capable of serving terabytes of information to web browsers, iphones, and other mobile devices in 4 months. I started it by leading an inception, and saw it through to launch.

Architect / Senior Developer, Client: Custom Book Publishing Company

I helped bring site from concept to launch in 3 months. I implemented much of its web 2.0 frontend and rails backend, including a scaleable AWS architecture, capable of supporting thousands of concurrent users, ordering, customizing, and printing books.

Client Principal / Lead, Client: Major Construction Company

I was responsible for a systems implementation of a punchlist product from inception to launch. I led requirements gathering sessions, led development, and collaborated closely with its customers to see it through to a successful 1.0 release. Replacing a previous system, the new system is up to 10 times more responsive, scales to millions of records, handles concurrent users and offline access, and was delivered on time and on budget.

Client Principal / Lead, Client: Construction Services Company

I managed the client relationship and led development of their flagship product. My team of 2-6 completed a ruby on rails rewrite and data migration of this multiyear legacy Java system in 6 months. I collaborated with my client's clients to sell, design and develop new products.

Senior Developer, Product: Pivotal Tracker

As a senior developer, I was responsible for much of a UI overhaul as we pushed it toward full public release.

ThoughtWorks Inc., 2000-2007

As an Extreme Programming Coach, I concentrated on gelling teams and introducing Agile Best Practices as well as mentoring developers and business analysts. As a developer, I was responsible for evolving much of the architecture on each of my projects at ThoughtWorks. During my time here, I taught unit testing workshops, hosted the Bay XP User Group, presented at various conferences, co-started the first GeekNight, and even got a chance to pair with people like Ward Cunningham, Martin Fowler, Robert Martin, and Brian Marick.

Lead Facilitator / Trainer, QuickStart Engagements

Led several QuickStarts and developed and taught internal classes to train other facilitators. In this type of engagement, a small ThoughtWorks team facilitates intense working meetings with stakeholders, BAs and developers to drive out clear business goals and objectives, and eventually flesh out enough requirements to kickoff an agile project. The projects that I started this way ranged from small 4 person projects to 30 person, multimillion dollar projects lasting multiple years.

Dev Lead / Product Owner, Product: CruiseControl.rb

Led a small development team to design and implement a ruby version of cruise control. We drove the product to a successful 1.0 release and beyond under schedule. It is now the de facto standard for ruby continuous integration, in use in hundreds of projects around the world. I remain active as a lead developer today of this open source project.

Product Consultant, Client: Language Workbench Product Company

Drove requirements and did research for a next generation IDE for developing Domain Specific Languages. Served as a source of industry knowledge and best practices for this developer tool.

Agile Coach / Senior Architect, Client: Major Financial Company

As the project coach, I was responsible for evolving the process that grew the team from 5 architects on a pilot project to the eventual roll out of 30 developers spread across 3 sites. As an architect, I was responsible for much of the architecture which Microsoft published in the early days of .NET development.

Senior Developer / Team Lead, Client: Major Petroleum Company

I helped define methodology and architecture on this 100+ person project developing a bespoke oil trading application. I also contributed significantly to a custom pre-hibernate persistence layer and wrote the data migration framework used for migrating over 100 legacy tables on release.

Agile Coach / Dev Lead, Client: Container Shipping Web Service

I introduced XP and other best practices to the project & client. I also pioneered n-stage XSL transforms, developed a powerful framework for writing web applications, and rewrote and optimized an entity bean code generator.

IBM Corp., 1999-2000

Software Developer / Team Lead

I led the Windows GUI team on a large-scale cross-platform C++/Java environment. I led development of Testing Frameworks, User Wizards, and Dynamic Control Resizing for Internationalization.

Intel Corp., 1998

Software Developer (intern)

I developed a feature-rich IDE for non-programmer chip testers to write test scripts. I also collaborated with an external vendor to develop a commercial Failure Analysis Tool.

Microsoft Corp., 1997

Software Developer in Test (intern), Expedia

As part of the Expedia team, I was responsible for the development of a database stress-testing tool with an MFC interface, and limited "Smart Monkey"/ AI functionality.

University of Southern California, 1995-1999

Research Assistant, Robotics Lab

In my time with the Robotics Lab, I worked on an behavioral AI software for directing small robots and a real-time 3D physical simulation of a human torso.