History


Delon R. Newman—Software, Training and Design

Consulting Software Engineer  · Remote · 3/2021 - Present

Consulting as a software engineer. Mentoring programmers at all levels of experience. Volunteer time each week toward building systems to assist with coordinating community outreach. Also volunteer on open source projects.

  • While helping a team with their React based frontend (without any experience with React) created a custom calendar component that fit their needs after recognizing that the off-the-shelf open source options wouldn’t work for them. Was able to deliver this component ahead of schedule with test coverage and with an array of date utilities that came to be adopted by the team throughout the rest of the code base.

  • An organization’s management was considering rewriting a legacy Rails application they’d inherited. I suggested that they might consider keeping the legacy app while adapting it to their micro service architecture. Within a few weeks the app was upgraded and Dockerized with the beginnings of test coverage (before this there were no tests). It also now had JSON API, and a new Svelte-based UI (according to organizational standards) with no prior Svelte experience.

  • With no Julia programming experience was able to help a high functioning team improve the quality of their Julia code base and testing which identified a critical production bug

  • Rescued the source code of a running Rails application. The developer had unfortunately disappeared. Was able to collect source code from AWS ElasticBeanstalk deployments (while having to fill in a number of missing pieces). Got it into a Github repository, upgraded from Rails & Ruby, and resolved a number of bugs and issues on it’s Vue.js frontend (having never used Vue.js before this).

Ruby TypeScript JavaScript Rails HTMX React Svelte Nodejs C Clojure REST AWS NLP Docker Git PostgreSQL Julia Opensource SQL Mentoring Micro‑services Web‑services Web‑Development Pair‑Programming TDD Remote‑Work Contracting

What Others Say

Delon's enthusiasm for tackling challenges is infectious. He clearly loves learning and he soaks up information, but he still looks for pragmatic approaches to solving the problem at hand.

Jordan Owens, Software Engineer, Neomind Labs

He is extremely knowledgeable with compile systems and also demonstrated a great ability to grasp new frontend concepts...

Jared Brown, Senior Software Engineer, Revolution Mortgage

Related Projects

A Natural Language Healthcare Provider Search

01 April 2023

A Natural Language Healthcare Provider Search

YAMLScript Logo
I was able to help one of my programming heros with his new language by contributing FFI bindings for Ruby, Java and Clojure.

01 February 2024

YAMLScript FFI Bindings

Programming‑Languages Opensource Ruby Java Clojure C FFI
In support of the development of an NLP Service for a client. Implemented an opensource Ruby extension for a fast Levenshtein distance and similarity ratio in C.

29 April 2022

MiniLevenshtien

Ruby C NLP Opensource Rubygems
Quickly implemented an opensource Ruby extension for handlebars.js compatibility and integrated into a legacy Rails application. Enabled the clients dev team to use their new M1 MacBooks.

12 January 2022

Minibars

Ruby Rails C JavaScript HTML Templates Rubygems Opensource

University of New Mexico Hospitals

Web Analyst III (Full-time) · Albuquerque, New Mexico · 3/2019 - 3/2021

Hired on full-time after a six-month contract (from 3/2019—9/2019). Served as a lead engineer on a team of nine.

  • Was awarded multiple “I Care” awards by teammates & customers

  • Enjoyed mentoring junior developers

  • Led the design, development and integration (across various IT teams) of a system that has become the flagship product of the team used by over 30 clinics throughout the hospital system and a waiting list of many more; saving the organization millions of dollars

  • Completed a project within a few months that had been stalled for over 3 years

  • Helped organization quickly pivot to remote teams by leading the development of a clean & user-friendly time-tracking application during the pandemic from a very raw prototype that had been previously developed

  • Led an experimental project to create a compiler to automate the conversion of legacy applications

  • With little mobile programming experience built a well received iPad kiosk app

Ruby Rails JavaScript Microsoft‑SQL‑Server Oracle Docker Git Gitlab Perl Debian Ubuntu Linux Web‑Development iOS‑Development Mobile‑Development Swift Splunk Zoom Workflow SQL Product‑Design Mentoring Dashboards Pair‑Programming Form‑System Healthcare Hospitals Universities Remote‑Work

Related Projects

Hospital System Needs Intake Form System

01 March 2019

Hospital System Needs Intake Form System

Stagnated Survey System Comes to Life

01 June 2019

Stagnated Survey System Comes to Life

Health System Needs Punch System During Pandemic

01 September 2020

Health System Needs Punch System During Pandemic

An opensource Ruby object that represents a given time-of-day separate from any Date information. Makes it easy to perform work time calculations. This project made work time calculations more reliable on various projects.
An opensource Rails extension that provides a simple query interface for pulling deeply nested data from records. Helped simplify complex queries when dealing with deeply nested data (as is often the case in health care). Which lead to simpler and more reliable applications.

21 February 2020

ActiveRecord::Pull

Ruby Rails SQL Databases Opensource Functional‑Programming Rubygems
Implemented an opensource Ruby module that makes it easy to treat various objects as functions, and provides other helper methods for functional programming. Developed this while working on various systems and eased the load of writing data processing code.

05 February 2020

Invokable

Ruby Opensource Functional‑Programming Rubygems
An opensource Rails extension that provides union, intersect, and difference set operations for ActiveRecord (also, SQL’s UnionAll). Helped improve performance on complex queries while being able to take advantage of ActiveRecord’s ergonomic query interface.

30 January 2020

ActiveRecord::SetOps

Ruby Rails SQL Databases Opensource Math Rubygems
Built an (easy-to-use) command-line utility to assist a junior developer with PHP & Wordpress upgrades.

01 January 2020

Pho - Tasty PHP Upgrades

Perl Linux Automation CLI‑Tools
An old add for Yugos
An experimental tool for converting legacy ColdFusion applications into Ruby / Rack applications. Ultimately we decided it wasn't the right path for us, but you can see the code archived here.

31 October 2019

Yugo - The Old is New Again

Programming‑Languages ColdFusion Ruby

Various Companies

Freelance Programmer  · Connecticut, Hawai'i, New Mexico · 9/1999 - 9/2019

Got started at 18 years old writing a data conversion script in Perl for my mother’s client in the manufacturing industry.

Clients have included small businesses, universities, staffing agencies (e.g. Robert Half Technology, ALTRES, & TekSystems) and large organizations (e.g. University of New Mexico Hospitals, Central New Mexico Community College, The Department of Veterans Affairs, Time Warner & Master Card) across industries (e.g. retail, marketing, health care, education, research, non-profit) in Connecticut, Hawaii and New Mexico. Have come to specialize in systems integration, business process management, and data-oriented programming.

  • With minimal JavaScript experience at the time built JavaScript heavy dashboards and backend Java / JSP code for a multi-tier system that read sensors in heavy equipment, boats, yachts, and recreational vehicles.

  • Without any Flash or ActionScript experience converted a Flash animation from the website of an aerospace company into a trade show display adding a ticker tape display whose message (which could be edited by a user) would transition between the ticker tape and the original Flash animation/video.

  • Worked on a Java based VoIP heads up display system for a telecommunications company that they had implemented for their help desk staff. It was intermittently crashing without reporting errors. Adding logging, a test suite and cleaning up the code greatly reduced the crashing with errors being reported when it did.

  • Implemented a health insurance integration for a college which involved creating complex SQL queries, creating a custom EDI 834 generator (had to quickly learn the EDI 834 standard over a weekend), and a scheduled upload to the insurance company.

  • Helped an IT Services company move a stalled project forward by creating an integration for Microsoft Exchange, moving their code into source control, and getting them into a bi-weekly sprint cycle.

  • Developed a logging system for a small software company that could handle thousands of requests per second and run on a hosted VPS taking inspiration from Kafka for the logging and using MySQL for permanent storage and querying based on Datalog and the EAV pattern.

Ruby Rails Java JavaScript Perl PHP C‑Sharp Dot‑Net VBA Microsoft‑Access Python Clojure ClojureScript Groovy Oracle MySQL Linux Redhat Jenkins EDI‑834 ETL SQL Data‑Engineering Colleges Universities Small‑Businesses Education Non‑Profits Contracting Freelance Remote‑Work Web‑Development

What Others Say

You'll find out how strong communication works, ‘he get's it’.

Dick Belmont, VP Executive Producer, Creative Director, The BCB Group

Related Projects

Community College Urgently Needs Data Integration

01 November 2018

Community College Urgently Needs Data Integration

A bus tracking system designed to help coordinate tours for an international convention held in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was implemented by creating a frontend that managed data entry and received location updates from an OpenGTS Server.
Worked on a VoIP heads up display system for a telecommunications company that they’d implemented for their help desk staff. It was intermittently crashing without reporting errors. Adding logging and cleaning up the code a bit greatly reduced the crashing and errors were reported. Implemented a Windows Service in Python to kill stale processes.

01 January 2013

VoIP Heads Up Display for Oceanic Time Warner

Java Integration AWT Python Windows Desktop‑Applications Contracting
Developed a command line tool for automating Tomcat installations, upgrades, and app deployments. While working on upgrading a lecacy struts application for a client. The tool has proved to be useful many times since. You can find the source here.

01 March 2012

Tom - Tomcat with a Remote Control

Perl Java Tomcat Automation CLI‑Tools Web‑Scraping
A case management system developed for a non-profit that provides services for families of prison inmates. This was my first Rails application (just after it hit "1.0"). It was also a painful lesson in avoiding rewrites unless it really is for the best.

01 April 2006

Odyssey

Rails Ruby MySQL Web‑Development

HackHands

Mentor (Contract) · Remote · 4/2016 - 3/2019

Mentored university students studying computer science & software engineering, entrepreneurs and working programmers in various technologies. Did so with the help of the HackHands platform, Zoom, GitHub and email.

Mentoring Teaching Zoom GitHub JavaScript Ruby Rails PHP Java C‑Sharp MySQL SQL Pair‑Programming Remote‑Work

What Others Say

Unbelievable fast, funny guy who is an absolute pro in the field...He not only helped me but even provided a better solution to the problem in a matter of minutes.

Philip, Mentor Review

I had a great session with Delon, he was very understanding and had a lot of patience with me. He has a lot of experience to help you out and guide you to solve your problem. I recommend him 100%.

Marisol, Mentor Review

Pacific Health Research & Education Institute

Data Manager (Full-time) · Honolulu, Hawai'i · 1/2013 - 1/2016

Performed duties as a member of a research team for a NIH diabetes study (GRADE) including meeting with patients, processing lab specimens, etc. Also, served as IT liaison for the team, and developed custom software to improve day-to-day operations as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis.

  • Developed a workflow and case management system with built-in reporting, scheduling and EHR features while handling other responsibilities as part of the research team.

  • Developed an application that interfaced with a legacy console application (VistA), parsed text reports and generated PDF reports performing tasks in seconds that previously took hours.

  • Coached researchers on creating complex SQL queries to query data-warehouse

Ruby Java JavaScript Clojure Datomic PostgreSQL Git VistA Windows Linux HIPAA Scheduling EHR EMR Workflow Healthcare Health‑Research Product‑Design Mentoring SQL Microsoft‑Access Scheduling‑System Web‑Development Research VistA

Related Projects

While contracting for PHREI a second time—now a subsidiary of the VA—Developed an application that interfaced with a legacy console application (VistA), parsed text reports and generated PDF reports performing tasks that previously took hours in seconds.
While working as a part of the research team, developed a participant retention system that included workflow, scheduling, and EHR features.

Pacific Health Research & Education Institute

Programmer / Analyst (Full-time) · Honolulu, Hawai'i · 12/2009 - 12/2011

Served as staff programmer on two NIH cancer studies (PLCO and NLST), developed custom data management, workflow and case management applications as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis. I was laid off at the close of the studies (along with the rest of the staff) then re-hired a year later to work on the GRADE study.

  • Developed custom data management, workflow and case management applications as well as many small scripts and programs for impromptu reporting and data analysis which allowed me to provide critical study statics and reports at a moments notice.
  • Developed methods for dealing with some very complex logistical constraints imposed on the studies.

  • Added a feature to Ruby’s “gem” command to install gems from a directory. This was necessary since the study’s computers were not allowed to connect to the Internet (see source code here).

  • Saved the institute thousands of dollars in software and hardware purchases

  • Designed various workflow systems using Ruby on Rails and MySQL

  • Developed micro services in Ruby & Sinatra that could be used by various of these workflow systems and desktop applications

  • Developed desktop applications in Python and Qt.

  • Integrated web applications into a standard Windows desktop configuration for staff of over 50 research assistants.

  • Started my quest to understand the challenges involved with modeling healthcare, biological and other sparsely structured data.

Ruby Rails Sinatra Perl Python Qt JavaScript C‑Sharp Git SSH PuTTY MySQL REST Microsoft‑Access VBA Windows Ubuntu Linux HIPAA Health‑Research Product‑Design Micro‑services Web‑services Web‑Development Windows‑Development Dashboards TDD Workflow Research

What Others Say

He easily translates highly technical information to the non-programmer. He has an uncanny ability to see many creative programming approaches to a given task, and routinely presents choices that I often did not know were options.

Victoria Jenkins, Study Coordinator, Pacific Health Research & Education Institute

Related Projects

NIH Research Site Needs a Workflow System

01 August 2011

NIH Research Site Needs a Workflow System

A workflow system for closing out records for the PLCO and NLST studies. It was built with Sinatra on top of the infrastructure I'd built for the institute starting with the Mercury project (see Mercury).
A workflow system for auditing patient records at the end of a 50 year cancer study. It was used by around 30 employees and enabled them to quickly audit the records of over 10,000 study participants.
Started as an MS Access database that helped to clean up duplicate and erroneous participant records. The system was later ported to MySQL and retained the MS Access UI, provided a new desktop UI and micro service that was used by other systems. A Ruby API and CLI tool was also created for quickly generating ad-hoc reports.

Naugutuck Valley Community College / ConnCAP

Tutor / Mentor (Part-time) · Waterbury, Connecticut · 11/2000 - 4/2004

Tutored students in primarily mathematics, science & computers, but also other subjects at a college, high school and middle school level as a part of the ConnCAP program. Mentored students on educational skills and on field trips in the summer program.

Mentoring Teaching Math Colleges Education

What Others Say

Delon's knowledge of mathematics is extensive and he is able to prepare and deliver instruction in such a unique manner that students are eager and able to learn....It isn't often that one finds students in an after-school program who are eager to study math and science, but Delon is able to command that level of respect and enthusiasm from his tutees.