John Shields
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
John has a passion for elegant software and the art of taking it from ideation to production quickly. In his 16+ year career as a developer and architect, John has had the opportunity to help the smallest startups through large multi-national corporations to create quality software fast.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Java, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse IDE, MacOS
The most amazing...
...application I've built is a system integration product to sync staffing agency candidate information among disparate systems, eliminating duplicate entries.
Work Experience
Technical Architect
TubeMogul, Inc.
- Worked with teams at TubeMogul to provide architectural input and guidance as well as hands-on coding to implement specific features, capabilities, and libraries.
- Designed, documented, and coded a set of low-level libraries for use by all TubeMogul Java projects to consistently implement application configuration with first-class environment support and dynamic capabilities, service discovery, standardized application packaging, a standardized maven parent POM with dependencies, and other features to allow the applications to consistently interact with their environment.
- Designed, documented, and implemented a Docker based local development environment capability to allow developers to perform more full-cycle development and testing.
- Designed, documented, and implemented TubeMogul's continuous delivery capabilities in Jenkins. This included standardizing the company's Git branching model, build process, and deployment process as well as implementing their automated integration. Worked with Operations to create infrastructure and networking rules for this capability. Continued evolving the deployment scripts and infrastructure for cleaner deployments.
- Evangelized continuous delivery with teams and assisted them with adoption.
- Worked on the Statistics team to improve and operate a large scale Hadoop-based data processing pipeline. This pipeline processed billions of transactions per day to record, process, enhance, aggregate, and report on events within TubeMogul's online advertising platform.
- Helped design, code, and integrate a new finance module into the ecosystem to allow for more accurate and fine-grained billing of accounts as well as first-class support for multiple currencies.
- Created a cloud-based database backup system to reliably back up a cluster of 100 MySQL nodes and automatically validate each backup. The system included an AngularJS web console for inspecting the status of backups and reporting any errors.
Senior Systems Architect
Passbox, LLC
- Worked with a small, dedicated team to develop the Passbox in-store loyalty network product from the ground up. The product provided convenience stores with in-store daily deals, loyalty rewards, and targeted marketing all with high consumer engagement. This product spanned many technologies including an Android application deployed on in-store tablets, an iPhone application, a cloud-based server infrastructure, and a custom Verifone POS application. The system integrated with multiple external systems including the Excentus gas loyalty network, the Twilio SMS network, and the Giftango gift certificate network.
- Designed, developed, and deployed the cloud infrastructure to create a scalable, easily updated, and reliable server environment.
Systems Architect
The Codeworks, Inc.
- Worked as the system architect to design, develop, deploy, and support TCWI’s VMS Express product. This product utilizes many current technologies including cloud-based deployment, RESTful web services, a custom web browser client, server-side JavaScript business rules, SOAP web services, Kapow web scraping technologies, and configurable integration routes via Apache Camel.
- Worked as the primary sales engineer to demo VMS Express for potential clients.
- Managed the development team and process for product planning and strategy.
- Managed a client team at a Forbes Global 2000 company through requirements gathering, design, and implementation of the company’s internal Intranet application. This application utilized the Vignette Content Management System and Portal products to provide personalized content delivery to the company’s employees.
Director of Engineering
MechanicNet Group, Inc.
- Managed a team of software engineers and technical support staff through both new development and maintenance of a custom CRM platform that mines vehicle maintenance records to send postcard and email service reminders as well as other communications.
- Designed, developed, and deployed a custom data load infrastructure to nightly load 40-80,000 vehicle maintenance records (with peaks ~350,000) from over 80 proprietary XML data representations into a single normalized database.
- Implemented engineering processes, procedures, and disciplines including version control, defect tracking, release scheduling and management, code inspections, isolated and virtualized developer environments, production-mirroring QA environments, a centralized documentation repository, and a reliable software package release system.
- Designed and developed numerous web applications including a self-service postcard promotion system.
Software Engineer
Robert Half International, Inc.
- Customized and implemented Wily Technology’s Introscope J2EE performance monitoring system.
- Designed and developed a custom Java performance monitoring infrastructure.
- Worked on a team to design and develop an enterprise J2EE application that includes a desktop (Swing) client, web services architecture, and a standard J2EE application server tier.
- Architected and developed a client-side Swing data binding and validation framework and a server-side persistence framework based on the Spring Framework and Hibernate.
- Created and customized the Ant build system for the Java infrastructure.
Consultant
Accenture
- Designed, coded, and documented various Java web application components for applications such as an online testing system, a billing system interface, and an enterprise application integration system.
- Managed development teams through requirements gathering, design, implementation, and testing.
- Worked closely with client personnel throughout project phases, including activities such as requirements gathering, design sessions, system implementation, and client relationship building.
- Wrote technical documentation covering topics such as UNIX technical architecture, web-based application architecture and design, support processes and enterprise process impact, development tools configuration and support, and other technical topics.
- Coded various computer application components including development support tools, billing system components, and web-based components.
Experience
VMS Express
http://www.bullhorn.com/products/vms-integration/What made this application interesting is that none of the VMS products provided APIs. This means that all of the integration was accomplished with web scraping. I built all of the integration pipelines to handle the input and output with all of the various VMS products and with the ATS. The system was designed to be very modular with adapters for both the VMS and ATS and a scriptable data mapping layer.
Finance/Fees Module
Passbox Loyalty Network
The Java-based server application handled events from the stores to calculate and award points, award prizes and instant rewards, publish information and images to the in-store Android tablets, and handle communication with users (email/text). There was also a web based administrative UI to allow configuration by Passbox and client administrators.
The server utilized SVG image processing to display dynamic images on the in-store tablets allowing for an immersive and customized experience to the end-users.
Skills
Languages
Java, SQL, JavaScript, TypeScript, Perl
Frameworks
Angular, Apache Camel, Spring, Hibernate, AWS HA, Swing, Dropwizard, Hadoop
Tools
Jenkins, AWS SDK, Apache Maven, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Git, Docker Compose, Eclipse IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, Jetty, Gradle
Paradigms
REST, DevOps, Agile Software Development
Platforms
Amazon EC2, Kubernetes, Spinnaker, Apache Kafka, Docker, MacOS, Jakarta EE, Android, iOS, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Other
Software Development, LXC, SOAP, Vignette
Storage
Spring Data, AWS SWF, MySQL
Education
Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering with a Biomedical Engineering Specialization
Southern Methodist University - Dallas, TX
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring