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Chris Schuster, Full-stack Developer in Evanston, IL, United States
Chris Schuster

Full-stack Developer in Evanston, IL, United States

Member since February 10, 2021
Chris is a full-stack generalist well-practiced in delivering projects under extreme programming (XP) principles. He's spent several years implementing pair programming and test-driven development in several languages (Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and a few others). Chris has also mentored or paired with dozens of client programmers over the years and served as the lead developer on most of his projects.
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Portfolio

  • Pivotal
    PostgreSQL, Cloud, Agile, Test-driven Development (TDD), Spring, Java, APIs...
  • Captricity (now Vidado)
    Jenkins, Celery, Django, Python 2, APIs, Linux, PostgreSQL, REST, Databases...
  • Thoughtworks
    Agile, Test-driven Development (TDD), Ruby on Rails (RoR), Spring, Ruby, Java...

Experience

Location

Evanston, IL, United States

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Kotlin, Spring, Java, Linux

The most amazing...

...thing was when the client's head of IT asked to use my estimation engine for pricing—it was faster and 100% accurate as compared to manual work.

Employment

  • Senior Staff Developer

    2016 - 2019
    Pivotal
    • Developed a system to value the trillions of dollars in assets of a multinational bank in minutes for any selected denomination.
    • Designed an estimation engine for a health insurer that was more accurate than the (then current) pricing engine.
    • Increased the efficiency of an in-house reporting task force by 300% for a data technology client.
    • Developed a front end compliant with the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) level AA for a national credit card issuer.
    • Created a visualization system to see the (relative) employee efficiency of over 400 healthcare systems.
    • Modernized the handling of ACORD data for a national commercial insurer. While developing the new system, we discovered two critical issues with the current systems during a side-by-side comparison.
    Technologies: PostgreSQL, Cloud, Agile, Test-driven Development (TDD), Spring, Java, APIs, Design Patterns, Linux, REST, Databases, JavaScript, Networking, Unix, Microservices, JOOQ, Concourse CI, Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) (Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)), Angular, FreeMarker, Bamboo, MarkLogic, MariaDB, MySQL, Redis, Gradle, AMQP, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Spring Boot, RESTful Development, Architecture, Full-stack, React, TypeScript, Spring Security, Project Leadership, Technical Leadership, Apache HTTP Server, REST APIs, CSS, HTML, New Relic, Datadog, SQL, Data Architecture, Data Warehouse Design, Data Warehousing, Data Engineering, ETL, JUnit, RDBMS, Hibernate, Apache Maven, JDK 8, JMS, RESTful Services, API Design, CI/CD Pipelines, Unit Testing, Back-end, Healthcare Software, Kotlin, Google Cloud, Leadership, Finance

  • Senior Developer

    2015 - 2016
    Captricity (now Vidado)
    • Split up a monolithic computer vision service into four services.
    • Created a performance testing framework so that the QA department could execute performance tests against any system and environment.
    • Resolved several critical performance issues (one within my first week of joining) that if left unresolved would have led to service level agreement damages in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
    Technologies: Jenkins, Celery, Django, Python 2, APIs, Linux, PostgreSQL, REST, Databases, JavaScript, Unix, Microservices, Redis, AMQP, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, RESTful Development, Architecture, Full-stack, Python, Project Leadership, Technical Leadership, Startups, High-tech Startups, REST APIs, CSS, HTML, New Relic, Datadog, Data Architecture, RDBMS, RESTful Services, API Design, CI/CD Pipelines, Unit Testing, Back-end, Leadership

  • Developer

    2013 - 2015
    Thoughtworks
    • Integrated with a documentation-less mainframe to create a system capable of creating over 400 account statements in minutes for a large multinational bank.
    • Created an infrastructure-as-code system to deploy an application with a database before the advent of Docker.
    • Resolved a severe bug in AWS cloud-formation that prevented resources from being freed. This bug had been open for over four months and the resources that hadn't been freed were billed to the client, a major airline.
    Technologies: Agile, Test-driven Development (TDD), Ruby on Rails (RoR), Spring, Ruby, Java, Design Patterns, MongoDB, Chef, Linux, Cloud, REST, Databases, JavaScript, Networking, Unix, Spark, Microservices, Scala, Clojure, FreeMarker, MySQL, Redis, Hadoop, Gradle, APIs, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Spring Boot, RESTful Development, Architecture, Full-stack, Spring Security, Project Leadership, Technical Leadership, Apache HTTP Server, NGINX, REST APIs, CSS, HTML, New Relic, SQL, ETL, JUnit, RDBMS, Hibernate, Apache Maven, JDK 8, RESTful Services, API Design, CI/CD Pipelines, Unit Testing, Back-end, Leadership, Finance

  • Junior Developer

    2012 - 2013
    ThoughtWorks
    • Reduced the monthly workload of the human resources department by 16 hours through automation.
    • Maintained a daily ETL system for item indexing in a large scale auction house in the automotive space.
    • Parallelized a single-threaded supply-chain management system for a multinational retailer.
    Technologies: Java, Spring, Test-driven Development (TDD), Agile, CSS, HTML, ETL, JUnit, RDBMS, JDK 8, RESTful Services, API Design, CI/CD Pipelines, Unit Testing, Back-end

Experience

  • Health Care Cost Estimator
    https://my.providerfinderonline.com/?ci=IL-NOEX-PUBNETS

    A Java Spring application that allows health insurance members to preview how much an operation/physician visit would lower their remaining deductible/maximum out of pocket.

    I was the lead developer for this project and, alongside general development, also created a tool to make side-by-side comparisons against the legacy pricing engine. This project's general success led to it becoming the primary source of prices in the client architecture despite not being a goal of the project.

  • Discover Credit Card Application
    https://www.discovercard.com/application/website/apply?srcCde=KXPA

    A Java Spring application that handled all new credit card applications to Discover and was responsible for serving the user interface, validating said application, and sending valid applications to the mainframe.

    I was the lead developer for this project.

  • Portfolio Valuation

    A Java Spring application that enables the bank to value all of their customers' holdings in any and all desired currencies at any point.

    I was the lead developer for this project. The system needed to value assets that ranged from personal holdings to billions of dollars worth of varied asset types. It processed every portfolio in a matter of minutes (even less when we dedicated more machines to computation).

Skills

  • Languages

    Java, Kotlin, SQL, CSS, HTML, C, Ruby, Python 2, JavaScript, Scala, Clojure, C++, R, Python, TypeScript

  • Frameworks

    JUnit, Spring, Spring Boot, Spring Security, Hibernate, Spark, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Django, Angular, Hadoop

  • Tools

    JDK 8, Jenkins, Concourse CI, Gradle, Chef, Celery, MATLAB, FreeMarker, Bamboo, Apache HTTP Server, NGINX, Apache Maven

  • Paradigms

    Test-driven Development (TDD), Unit Testing, Agile, REST, Microservices, Design Patterns, RESTful Development, ETL

  • Other

    Back-end, Computer Science, Mathematics, Cloud, APIs, Architecture, Full-stack, Project Leadership, Technical Leadership, Data Architecture, RESTful Services, API Design, CI/CD Pipelines, Healthcare Software, Leadership, Finance, Networking, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Startups, High-tech Startups, Data Warehousing, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse Design

  • Libraries/APIs

    JOOQ, REST APIs, AMQP, React, JMS

  • Platforms

    Linux, Unix, VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) (Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Kubernetes, New Relic

  • Storage

    Databases, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, RDBMS, Google Cloud, MarkLogic, Redis, MongoDB, Datadog

Education

  • Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science
    2008 - 2012
    University of Chicago - Chicago, IL, United States

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