Ryan McElroy
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Charlotte, NC, United States
Toptal member since June 1, 2021
Ryan is a software development, design, and management professional with 10+ years of experience as a consultant, including 5+ years at the executive level. His expertise ranges from hands-on development/operations to solution and enterprise architecture. With broad industry experience (insurance, finance, eCommerce, utilities, and more), Ryan brings value to any client who wants to start on the right foot or improve what they have.
Portfolio
Experience
- C# - 9 years
- Visual Studio - 9 years
- ASP.NET - 9 years
- Entity Framework - 9 years
- Azure DevOps - 7 years
- Azure Functions - 4 years
- Angular - 4 years
- Azure - 4 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Windows, Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), .NET
The most amazing...
...thing I've helped build is a healthcare claims processing system that replaced 24,000 lines of SQL stored procedures.
Work Experience
Vice President of Technology
Hylaine
- Joined this software consulting startup as number two employee and played a pivotal role in growing the firm to 120 people over 5 years, despite COVID-19.
- Ranked as the best place to work in Charlotte, North Carolina, for midsize companies in 2020 and 2021. Hylaine also achieved 0% turnover for a 16 month period and has a consistent turnover rate of less than 4%.
- Managed and provided support for our two technical service lines and around 66% of our consulting pool, application development, and business intelligence, ensuring excellent design and delivery of dozens of projects.
- Built a processing system using Azure Service Fabric microservices to replace a collection of monolithic stored procedures, increasing performance by 75% and creating a suite of unit and integration tests to support accuracy.
- Built an aggregate risk-exposure tracking and management system that used real-time calculations and caching to beat competing SaaS product SLAs and achieved 10,000 times the typical load targets and horizontal scale goals.
- Completed an agile transformation for an IT organization of over 50 and reduced release pipeline lengths from six months to one week via process improvements and CI/CD implementations.
- Analyzed a core financial systems platform, including identifying performance improvement opportunities that reduced processing SLAs by 25% and provided the client with a market analysis that reduced licensing costs by 75%.
- Analyzed a flagship field-work platform for a client with an upcoming 10-time load launch, including identifying key performance issues, developing proofs of concepts for improvement, and creating a data-driven roadmap for a successful launch.
- Codesigned a billing processing system accountable for a significant portion of group healthcare insurance invoicing. Achieved 15 times the performance of the legacy system and a comprehensive unit testing suite and delivered on time and budget.
- Developed various eCommerce integration microservices, using Azure Functions and Cosmos DB, and integrated with a wide range of legacy and REST APIs.
Technical Writer
Sema Technologies, Inc.
- Bootstrapped a startup firm's marketing presence via blogs, interviews, whitepapers, and more.
- Created content hosted on sites like Stack Overflow and widely shared on social media around communication, technical skills, and management.
- Helped propel the client to a successful launch and Series B funding round.
Technical Writing Reviewer and Author
Auth0, Inc
- Reviewed and edited blog posts created by international contributors under tight deadlines for one of the most-read technical blogs in the world.
- Self-authored/ghostwrote articles to help salvage important topics when appropriate.
- Tested and verified technical content with dozens of software languages and tools to support a diverse, worldwide audience.
Consultant 2
CTS Inc.
- Progressed from being an intern to an account-anchor consultant at a southeast regional firm that CGI, Inc. purchased in 2017.
- Developed a custom BizTalk solution from scratch to manage scheduling and other topics as part of a pest control client's first enterprise service bus (ESB) backbone project.
- Acted as the technical lead for a Crystal Reports project and later as an SSRS reports individual contributor as part of the largest utility merger in US history. Focused on integrating and visualizing data for nuclear plant operations.
- Built the inaugural automated testing practice at an insurance client, using Coded UI tests while also improving manual testing practices and documentation.
- Assisted in developing a custom data ingestion, synchronization, and rules engine for a group insurance benefits application.
- Acted as the primary UI designer and maintainer, from scratch, for an internal application used at CTS, Inc. for summer cultural events.
Experience
Technical Blog Editing/Ghostwriting
I would join in at the ideation stage, talking with each blog author about their strengths and helping produce outlines that would be popular. I'd review and approve these outlines.
Then, the editing cycle would begin. For some authors, this would be grammar and tone fixes. Others would require significantly more intervention, including a total rebuild/ghostwriting (with their permission).
In addition, I was tasked with learning new technologies and testing the walkthrough portions of each blog. These ranged from the mainstream to the esoteric.
CustomTools.AlignMigration
https://github.com/Ryanman/CustomTools.AlignMigrationOne thing that's changed over the past few years is that TFS has evolved from an on-premise service with niche needs and customization to a true SaaS platform with a good API. So, doing things like migrating test cases is easy now—but, back then, you had to dig through dead links and poor documentation to build something reasonable.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Software Engineering
Auburn University - Auburn, AL, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Entity Framework, TFS API, PrimeNG, jQuery, Azure Active Directory Graph API
Tools
Visual Studio, TFS, Dapper, Postman, Redgate, Azure Application Insights, IntelliJ IDEA, Crystal Reports, AWS Glue, Amazon SageMaker, AWS IAM
Languages
C#, HTML5, CSS, SQL, ASP.NET Razor, C++, C, Prolog, Smalltalk, Java, Python
Frameworks
ASP.NET, Bootstrap, Entity Framework Core, .NET, Angular, Kendo UI, Aurelia
Paradigms
Test-driven Development (TDD), Azure DevOps, Coded UI Tests, Load Testing, HIPAA Compliance, Best Practices
Platforms
Windows, Azure, Azure Service Fabric, Azure Functions, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda, Mobile, iOS, Android, Blogger
Storage
Azure SQL Databases, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Azure SQL, Redis, Azure Cosmos DB, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), PostgreSQL
Industry Expertise
Healthcare
Other
Manual Software Testing, Software Architecture, Architecture, System Design, Technical Writing, Writing & Editing, CTO, APIs, Full-stack, Leadership, Solution Architecture, BizTalk, SSIS Custom Components, Performance Testing, Web3, Blogging, Blog Posting, Software Development, Content Writing
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