Ruffin Bailey

A code presenting a solution to the StackOverflow question asking for instructions on how to cut a UTF-8 string to a specific byte length. Though seemingly a niche task, it required understanding raw byte work, text encodings, the importance of testing, LINQ and its limitations, and—most importantly—problem-solving with a commitment to performance and efficiency.

The solution can immediately jump within six bytes of the final cut location. Its explanation is also straightforward and clear-cut. The previous answer used LINQ's takeWhile, creating a new string with a substring and remeasuring each time—for each byte—in the string until the requested length was reached. That system was massively inefficient.

As a project lead on an 18-month rewrite of Blackbaud, Inc.'s grantmaking platform, an approximately $30 mil/year revenue product, I was tasked with updating a legacy CSLA.NET-based application whose client side was mired in a Silverlight-dependent presentation stack.

I proposed a new MVP focus to ensure clients would have a new system to use before Silverlight's end-of-life date.

MY ROLE:
• Keep and maintain the legacy system's mature and complex business logic, written in C# and SQL Server using the CSLA framework.
• Create new Azure cloud microservices in the Blackbaud ecosystem using .NET MVC and MongoDB to act as a secure proxy to the legacy system's API
and support Blackbaud single sign-on and support inter-service interoperability/upsells.
• Use an 80/20 rule mentality to port the existing Silverlight UI to Angular 6, leveraging the existing UI as a high-fidelity prototype rather than reconceiving the entire system.

After presenting this plan, I was shifted from team lead to project lead. I worked closely with product management to define strategy, make tech stack decisions, create the backlog (from the epic, feature, and milestone macro to scrum story micro), and set development priorities for four development teams.

PeopleMatter was a SaaS solution for hiring, training, and scheduling applicants and employees who work in the services sector.

Work for PeopleMatter focused on two pieces:
1) Schedule, the module that creates schedules for employees and different stores, and maintains a running count of their hours worked and costs to staff.
2) Hire, where applicants to companies are tracked, interviews scheduled, and onboarding tasks (I-9 forms, workforce eligibility, training) can be managed.

Schedule work was done using .NET MVC with C#, SQL Server via NHibernate on the back-end and Knockout.js templating for the client. It initially was a seven-team project that leaned exceptionally forcefully on maximizing data on the client's browser and contained complex JavaScript view models bound to Knockout.js templates. The work centered largely on client validation—ensuring the proper translation of business rules from server to client code, speed optimization, memory management, AJAX interactions with server controller actions, and data serialization.

A link to a more in-depth description, with an explanation of my additional of paging to allow release on IE8 for a major badge client, can be found at the associated link.

I worked on a development 1 task for Army Mapper 3.0, the US army's enterprise geographic information system (GIS). It is used for a number of functions, including reviewing the utilization of real property (buildings, roads, parking lots) and other infrastructures on U.S. army bases. Army Mapper is used by the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management (OACSIM) as a tool to visualize the current state of the army's resource management across army installations (bases) worldwide.

Army Mapper 3.0 employed MapFish and MapServer to interface with spatially aware and flat data in Oracle and ESRI ArcSDE. The work was done in PL/SQL, C#, JavaScript, and Ext JS.

MarkUpDown is the most thoughtful Markdown editor for professionals on Windows 10. MarkUpDown is a universal Windows platform (UWP) application written in C# with server support in Node.js. MarkUpDown's marketing website can be viewed via the associated link and is available for purchase from the Windows Store.

Aside from some icon design help, I was solely responsible for all the facets of MarkUpDown, going far beyond simply programming the UWP application and into website design and marketing.