Jay is available for hire
Hire JayJay Robinson
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Fountaintown, IN, United States
Toptal member since June 18, 2020
Bio
Jay is a seasoned developer with a concentration on T-SQL and C# development. He focuses on data-tier development, and has considerable experience in improving the performance and maintainability of large-scale applications built around relational data models.
Portfolio
(An Analytics Company)
Microsoft Power BI, Azure, C#, Microsoft SQL Server
Salesforce (formerly ExactTarget)
C#, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server
Leaf Software
C#, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server
Experience
- T-SQL (Transact-SQL) - 19 years
- .NET - 16 years
- C# - 10 years
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Visual Studio
The most amazing...
...app I developed was an entire site dedicated to a team of players of a sports management game, with multivariate linear regression done entirely in T-SQL.
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer
2019 - PRESENT
(An Analytics Company)
- Led one of the development teams and worked as part of the engineering management—handling agile scrum master duties, conducting one-on-ones with my team, and more.
- Served in a DevOps role for our cloud-based infrastructure. Specifically, I created and manage the CI/CD strategy for our data warehouse.
- Worked as a database developer and regularly designed and developed the data layer for new features and subsystems.
- Spearheaded initiatives to drive improvements at this layer to non-functional concerns, such as performance and availability.
- Worked as an application developer, primarily using C#.
- Conducted and coordinated engineering staff training, participated in the hiring process, and led our engineering internship initiative.
Technologies: Microsoft Power BI, Azure, C#, Microsoft SQL Server
Senior Systems Engineer
2008 - 2019
Salesforce (formerly ExactTarget)
- Contributed to a SaaS platform that scales across hundreds of RDBMS instances and thousands of application servers, with a particular focus on asynchronous features that operate on data in bulk—often millions of rows of data.
- Participated in the successful zero-downtime deployment of dozens of major releases of that platform.
- Designed, developed, deployed, and maintained a REST API for a data warehouse.
- Mentored other developers on T-SQL best practices, provided in-house training for development and support teams, and contributed to official internal T-SQL standards for development.
- Improved the performance of dozens, if not hundreds, of stored procedures, through a variety of methods; including for example, better alignment of code with existing indexes, modification of indexes and creation of new ones, addressing parameter sniffing issues, caching results in the application layer where appropriate, addressing issues related to linked servers, and more.
Technologies: C#, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server
Systems Engineer
2005 - 2008
Leaf Software
- Replaced the use of an off-the-shelf data tier product with a faster, more efficient solution which was able to be deployed in the existing app with minimal interruption to the customer experience.
- Maintained the app, as part of a small team of developers, which tracked financial transactions for an automotive financing organization—troubleshooting and resolving issues, adding features, and improving stability and performance.
- Added a feature that would "phone-home" exceptions to our bug tracking software—allowing our team to begin addressing those exceptions before being notified by the customer.
Technologies: C#, .NET, Microsoft SQL Server
Project Manager
2001 - 2005
Frakes Engineering
- Contributed to the development of policies and procedures to meet certification guidelines for an industry association.
- Provided network administration for the organization, supporting technologies such as an Active Directory domain, Exchange Server, IIS, SQL Server, and ISA Server.
- Developed and deployed applications in a wide variety of industries—including pharmaceuticals, automotive, pulp and paper, chemicals, and agriculture.
- Developed the T-SQL portion of an application that managed an automated-storage-and-retrieval system for an automotive manufacturing facility; including stored procedures that provided the business logic for the robots.
- Hacked, as directed, a Unix system in order to gain the authorization needed to export the existing data from an IBM Informix database for the aforementioned ASRS, and then manually performed the ETL to import this data into my SQL Server database so that the customer did not need to manually inventory the entire contents of the ASRS as part of the transition.
Technologies: Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, C#, Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET)
Project Engineer
1997 - 2001
Rockwell Automation
- Provided technical support and network administration for the local office—supporting a variety of technologies, such as Novell Netware, a Windows domain, and several DOS applications running under Windows 95 and Windows 98 OS's.
- Developed and deployed applications in a wide variety of industries; including pharmaceuticals, automotive, food and beverage, and glass manufacturing.
- Developed and deployed a SQL Server/IIS/ASP application that displayed both charts and graphs in near-real-time, accessible by Netscape Navigator browsers on OS/2 clients.
- Developed and deployed an application for an assembly line, using Visual Basic 6 which gave the customer enough confidence—despite a negative history with another product group—to invest in future projects with my organization for the next several years.
- Developed and deployed, as part of the first implementation of a PCI-bus CNC controller, a Visual Basic 6 application that facilitated communication between the controller's software—which used an obsolete and unstable Microsoft technology, DDE—and my organization's standard controller software which used a C-based API.
Technologies: Rockwell Automation, Active Server Pages (ASP), IIS, Visual Basic 6 (VB6), Microsoft SQL Server
Experience
SQL Saturdays
I present technical sessions at PASS SQL Saturday events, as well as local chapter meetings.
My past SQL Saturday sessions and a summary of each session are listed below.
My past SQL Saturday sessions and a summary of each session are listed below.
SQL Saturday | Fast and Furious Dynamic SQL
We all appreciate a well-defined and well-tuned stored procedure. But sometimes the problem calls for a more dynamic solution. What are those problems and how do you generate SQL to solve them? After attending this session, you will be able to identify situations that call for dynamic SQL and address them with rapid, maintainable, and secure code.
SQL Saturday | Playing in Traffic: Lessons from High-Speed, High-Volume Applications
DBA - Database Development
How do you as a developer take database activity into account when designing and writing your code? What works well on a small scale can often fall down as traffic picks up. In this session, attendees will learn methods for making their SQL scripts run faster, avoid blocking, and remain stable in a busy environment
How do you as a developer take database activity into account when designing and writing your code? What works well on a small scale can often fall down as traffic picks up. In this session, attendees will learn methods for making their SQL scripts run faster, avoid blocking, and remain stable in a busy environment
SQL Saturday | Adding Lightness: Better Performance Through Compression
Application & Database Development
This is a deep dive into data compression in SQL Server and how it affects the performance of your database. After attending this session, you will be able to recognize situations in which enabling compression will help, how to configure it, and how to deploy it in busy production systems.
This is a deep dive into data compression in SQL Server and how it affects the performance of your database. After attending this session, you will be able to recognize situations in which enabling compression will help, how to configure it, and how to deploy it in busy production systems.
SQL Saturday | EXEC and sp_executesql: An ad hoc rally
Application & Database Development
The EXEC statement provides plenty of flexibility, and sp_executesql offers even more benefits on top of that. But both have their drawbacks, their nuances, and their impact on performance. After this session, you will know what to expect from the query processor when using these features in your code and how to get the most performance out of them.
The EXEC statement provides plenty of flexibility, and sp_executesql offers even more benefits on top of that. But both have their drawbacks, their nuances, and their impact on performance. After this session, you will know what to expect from the query processor when using these features in your code and how to get the most performance out of them.
SQL Saturday | Playing in Traffic: Lessons from High-Speed, High-Volume Applications
How do you as a developer take database activity into account when designing and writing your code? What works well on a small scale can often fall down as traffic picks up. In this session, attendees will learn methods for making their SQL scripts run faster, avoid blocking, and remain stable in a busy environment.
SQL Saturday | Adding Lightness: Better Performance Through Compression [PowerPoint]
Application & Database Development
This is a deep dive into data compression of the SQL Server and how it affects the performance of your database. After attending this session, you will be able to recognize situations in which enabling compression will help, how to configure it, and how to deploy it in busy production systems.
This is a deep dive into data compression of the SQL Server and how it affects the performance of your database. After attending this session, you will be able to recognize situations in which enabling compression will help, how to configure it, and how to deploy it in busy production systems.
SQL Saturday | Adding Lightness: Better Performance Through Compression [Demo]
Application & Database Development
This is a deep dive into the data compression features of the SQL Server and how it affects the performance of your database. After attending this session, you will be able to recognize situations in which enabling compression will help, how to configure it, and how to deploy it in your production systems.
This is a deep dive into the data compression features of the SQL Server and how it affects the performance of your database. After attending this session, you will be able to recognize situations in which enabling compression will help, how to configure it, and how to deploy it in your production systems.
Education
1995 - 1996
Undertook Courses in Computer Science
Purdue University - West Lafayette, IN, USA
1993 - 1996
Undertook Courses in Computer Science
Indiana University Bloomington - Bloomington, IN, USA
Skills
Tools
Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Apache, Git
Languages
C#, T-SQL (Transact-SQL), HTML, Visual Basic 6 (VB6), Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), Active Server Pages (ASP), PHP, JavaScript
Frameworks
.NET, Django REST Framework
Paradigms
Agile
Platforms
Windows, Windows Server, Linux, WordPress, Azure
Storage
Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), PostgreSQL
Other
IIS, Rockwell Automation, SOAP
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