History with REST

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.

• Led the development of a Natural Language Processing service to improve the usability of a client’s provider search feature

• 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

• Contributed Ruby, Java and Clojure bindings to a new open source programming language

• 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).

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 https://github.com/delonnewman/rubygems).

• 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.