Jordan Ambra, Software Developer in Oxford, United States
Jordan Ambra

Software Developer in Oxford, United States

Member since July 23, 2013
Jordan is a top-notch architect, developer, sysadmin, and entrepreneur with the passion and experience to help businesses solve complex problems. He is an expert full-stack developer, bringing projects from concept to completion, with a proven track record of delivering powerful, stable, and comprehensive solutions.
Jordan is now available for hire

Portfolio

Experience

Location

Oxford, United States

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

PyCharm, Sublime Text, Vagrant, Ubuntu

The most amazing...

...product I've built served nearly 250 million hits every month, with some of the highest speed and reliability on the web.

Employment

  • Architect, Developer, Manager

    2012 - PRESENT
    CPA Opinion Partners
    • Architected and implemented a software package to automate salary recommendations for company shareholders.
    • Created an automated continuous integration and continuous release process using Jenkins and Rackspace Cloud Servers.
    • Managed a small team to help design and implement features of the software.
    • Automated a series of medium-scale datasets to integrate into the application for calculations and data integrity.
    • Created a PDF generation service that converts web pages into PDFs and uploads them to CloudFiles for CDN distribution.
    Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Django, Python
  • Developer Operations

    2012 - PRESENT
    3S Mobile
    • Conceived and implemented a complete continuous integration and release cycle for development.
    • Implemented consistent developer environments using Vagrant, which integrates with the same build system as production.
    • Automated all unit, integration, and acceptance testing and made everything work from a command line and through a web interface.
    • Managed and automated server procurement using AWS and Rackspace.
    • Implemented a secure and efficient disaster recovery program with complete instructions for either partial or full recovery.
    Technologies: SQL, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Bash, Ruby, Python
  • Master Software Architect

    2007 - 2012
    ClickMotive
    • Created an extremely scalable and performant website templating architecture.
    • Served over 250 million hits per month (~100 hits/second), using 2 load balanced web servers and 5 load balanced database servers.
    • Created a fully automated, self-managing BI data warehouse and reporting solution, crunching around 1.5TB of data.
    • Integrated many 3rd party data sources into the data warehouse and platform and ensured high quality over a very large dataset.
    • Pioneered one of the first continuous integration and automated deployment platforms for SQL Server deployments.
    • Hired, lead, and managed a team of very talented developers to expand on the flagship product's capabilities and take it to the next level.
    • Created a variety of ETL processes for internal and external data consumption.
    • Implemented extremely high priority monitoring systems to ensure we reached ~100% uptime guarantees.
    • Created many backend management tools for account managers and other employees to see or manage relevant data.
    Technologies: Windows PowerShell, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Flex, Flash, T-SQL, C#
  • Freelance Developer

    2007 - 2008
    VMWare
    • Created a VMWare assessment tool in Flash, PHP, and XML that VMWare used to determine how people use their products.
    • Created a VMWare introduction marketing piece to help potential customers understand the product.
    • Developed a backend management framework for the assessment tool in Flash/Flex/AS3.
    • Managed communications among 4 teams that were working on the project.
    • Developed a backend CMS using CakePHP.
    Technologies: CSS, JavaScript, HTML, XML, PHP, Flex, Flash
  • Freelance Developer

    2006 - 2008
    Arby's Foundation
    • Wrote a CMS using CakePHP to support the Foundation's website.
    • Developed a planning/scheduling app to run all of the Foundation's events and manage invites and responses.
    • Stored and automatically reported on all data based on event and time triggers.
    • Created an automated registration business process from end to end, obsoleting paperwork and human error.
    • Used CakePHP, MySQL, and performed one of the first Google Maps API integrations.
    Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, PHP
  • Freelance Developer

    2006 - 2007
    Coca-Cola Corporation
    • Developed Coca-Cola's history timeline, using Flash. Probably one of Coca-Cola's longest-standing web assets at 6+ years old.
    • Created Coca-Cola's careers page.
    • Co-developed branding strategies and marketing documentation.
    • Fixed a variety of SEO problems to improve long-tail search results.
    Technologies: HTML, XML, PHP, Flash
  • Senior Developer

    2006 - 2007
    Overhead Door Corporation
    • Created a unified front-end web framework for all Overhead Door websites and applications to speed up development time.
    • Using that framework, wrote a sales force CRM tool in C#/ASP.NET to manage external clients.
    • Created automated code generation scripts, using MyGeneration, to improve developer productivity.
    • Developed HR's company-wide annual review survey system to securely store evaluations and report statistics to top executives.
    • Implemented and organized Sharepoint for the IT department.
    Technologies: T-SQL, HTML, JavaScript, C#
  • Senior Application Developer

    2004 - 2006
    Concentra, Inc
    • Developed a precursor to Google Maps for Concentra's Location Finder, integrating with Microsoft's MapPoint API.
    • Created applications and Windows services to automatically merge HR data into Active Directory and create logins for 11,000 employees, using C#, SQL Server, and Oracle.
    • Developed a custom search robot and engine in C# as a service, stored on SQL Server, including spell-checking and a precursor to Google's OneBox technology for semantic indexing.
    • Created a contact management system to automatically direct public queries to appropriate people in the company.
    • Authored technical and persuasive articles for internal and external clients.
    • Wrote a series of software libraries, including a precursor to jQuery or Backbone.js, common .NET data access libraries, spell-checking, and UI controls.
    • Architected and maintained Concentra's custom intranet portal, similar to Sharepoint.
    Technologies: JavaScript, VB.NET, C#, ASP.NET
  • Principal Application Developer

    2002 - 2004
    Dallas Baptist University
    • Redesigned DBU's website to reduce effort required to find information.
    • Created one of the first large scale Flash applications, the university's online admission application.
    • Developed a student worker time entry application in Flash.
    • Developed a first-of-its-kind multi-camera streaming web app for DBU's online baseball broadcast.
    • Mentored and taught other developers of best practices.
    Technologies: JavaScript, Flash, VBScript, ASP

Experience

  • ClickMotive Fusion

    A high-end, extremely performant, reliable website product for the automotive industry, complete with automated integration with inventory, social presence, and video delivery.

  • Reasonable Compensation
    http://www.reasonablecompensation.com

    This software allows CPAs to automatically determine a defensible recommended salary for their clients. CPAs simply enter their data and the software uses proprietary formulas, along with human approval, to determine an estimated appropriate salary, along with risk factors, a reasonable margin of error, and a thorough explanation in a beautifully laid-out PDF opinion.

  • Snap
    https://github.com/jordanambra/snap-flask

    Snap for Flask automatically sets up a completely working project structure that developers can use as a localhost environment and then deploy into production. It's based on Vagrant and uses Chef provisioning to automate the installation of software and configuration management.

  • Web services and their APIs abound. Unfortunately, the vast majority are difficult to use. Reasons range from poor design, to lack of documentation, to volatility, to unresolved bugs, or in some cases, all of the above. Follow the guidance in this post to help ensure that your web API is clean, well-documented, and easy-to-use. Such APIs are truly rare and are therefore much more likely to be widely adopted and used.

Skills

  • Languages

    SQL, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, C#, Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), Flash ActionScript, XML/XSLT, Python, Bash, VBScript, VB.NET, HTML, T-SQL, XML, CSS, Less, Java, C, C++, Haskell, AWK, CoffeeScript, Perl, Sass, Lua
  • Frameworks

    Bootstrap, Django, ASP.NET, Adobe Flex, Flask, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Selenium, ASP, Flex, Zend Framework, Windows PowerShell, Capybara
  • Libraries/APIs

    jQuery, Google AdWords, jQuery UI, Google Chart API, Puppet.js, Node.js, Facebook API, Fabric, Backbone.js
  • Tools

    Google Analytics, Subversion (SVN), Celery, GitHub, Mercurial, Jenkins, FogBugz, Flash, TeamCity, Bitbucket, RabbitMQ, Pivotal Tracker, Sublime Text, PyCharm, Basecamp, Eclipse IDE, Karma, Supervisor, Adobe AIR, Campfire, Fiddler, Git, Apache, NGINX, uWSGI, NAnt, Rake, Vagrant, Vim Text Editor, VirtualBox, Watir, Capistrano, Chef
  • Platforms

    Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace, Ubuntu
  • Storage

    Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Memcached, MongoDB, Redis, RavenDB
  • Other

    User Experience (UX), GitFlow, IIS, Architecture, Lean Development
  • Paradigms

    Model View Controller (MVC), Agile Software Development, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Continuous Integration (CI), Functional Programming, Kanban, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), REST, Asynchronous Programming, Extreme Programming, MapReduce, Scrum, Unit Testing, Test-driven Development (TDD), Cross-platform, Model View Viewmodel (MVVM)

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Management Information Systems
    2002 - 2005
    DBU - Dallas, Texas, USA

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