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Dan Linder
dan@abstractimplements.com
Camas, WA + Remote
Experienced software developer and engineering leader seeks to build great software as either a hands-on manager or individual technical contributor. I specialize in a broad range of backend skills valuable to early-stage startups, while always keeping the big picture in mind.
The Long Now Foundation
Technical Lead (2015 - 2025)
- Modernized and stabilized all production systems to SSL-protected, highly-available services using RDS database instances, load balancing, caching, and S3-backed CloudFront CDNs for all static assets.
- Located, transformed, and loaded 25 years of donation records into HubSpot CRM, giving management a complete historical view of donor activity.
- Designed and coded a replication fabric enabling a 360° view of donor activity synchronized across HubSpot CRM, Stripe, Shopify, and Django-based membership system via APIs, webhooks, events, and asynchronous job queueing.
- Transitioned payment providers without customer churn via concurrent provider operation with card expiration and by orchestrating secure porting of payment card data from legacy provider to Stripe.
- Avoided costly rewrite by extracting legacy business logic to REST API endpoints, facilitating transition to React frontend.
- Migrated WordPress to Ghost, including assets and legacy character set handling.
- On-call for all production systems.
- Cut IT spend by nearly half without degradation of service via budgeting, service consolidation, and management of vendor relations.
StyleSeat, Inc.
Senior Software Engineer (2011 - 2015)
- First engineering hire at a category-defining startup.
- Contributed across the board to every aspect of the early product, including frontend and backend coding, debugging, profiling, and optimizing of calendaring, scheduling, search, and mobile API.
- Built client payment card processing and marketplace provider ACH payouts, including several payment gateway transitions.
- Implemented cross-functional team model: engineers deployed into feature-focused teams composed of front- and backend engineers, product managers, and designers, while maintaining contact within “homerooms” to manage technical business.
- Increased customer revenue by leading payments team in creating a low-friction customer experience, including automatic charging and SMS/app-based tipping.
- Worked with product managers and designers to break complex requirements into actionable agile stories and then with engineers to assign point values to those stories to prioritize for implementation.
- Implemented unit tests in Django’s built-in test framework to achieve 90% coverage, including mocked and actual API responses from third-party APIs.
- Developed on-call rotation for all production systems.
- Led several team-building exercises, including “Fancy Fridays”, a whisky appreciation club, and a legendary fish taco fry at our offsites.
Current TV
Manager, Backend Software Engineering (2008 - 2011)
Lead Backend Software Engineer (2007 - 2008)
- Managed a team of five backend software engineers: 360° reviews, 1:1 meetings, hiring and retention decisions, career trajectory, skills development.
- Led re-architecting of backend as an easily-consumable REST web service, leading to collaboration between otherwise-unlikely partners.
- 0-downtime releases via API backwards-compatibility and database replication.
- Introduced pattern of stubbing out APIs to provide fabricated test data early in development cycle to accelerate frontend development.
- Led a well-received Hack Day, extracting closed-caption data from our broadcast signal to display relevant site content synchronized to television.
- Working with Will Wright and Stupid Fun Club, led the creation of the StoryMaker API for the audience-written TV series Bar Karma.
- Built a web scraper to pull audio-visual and text content for social news site.
- Implemented site search: query analyzer, stemming, faceting, ranking.
- Developed on-call rotation for all production systems.
University of Illinois
Software Developer, Disability Resources and Educational Services (2002 – 2007)
Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Computer Science (2000 – 2002)
- Development and sales of the Accessible Web Publishing Wizard, a W3C standards-compliant tool for Microsoft Office. Sold several large site-licenses before exit.
- Fixed hardware autorepeat in XFree86 keyboard accessibility and open-sourced Sun-compatible configuration utility to allow consistent UX across computer labs.
- Improved casenote efficiency via email ingestion and LDAP-driven autocomplete.
Abstract Implements, LLC
Principal (2000 - Present)
- Designed dashboards and kiosk displays, defined maintenance tasks on a custom time-series database, and improved performance through JVM tuning and GC selection for a solar monitoring and control platform.
- Built award-winning MVP web app for a mesh-networked data platform that monitors coin-op games, including dashboards, email / SMS alerting, and the API called by the embedded hardware.
Skills
Python, Django, Django REST Framework, FastAPI, Celery, SQS, RabbitMQ, Solr, Lucene, Algolia, MySQL, Postgres, RDS, AWS, EC2, CircleCI, New Relic, Sentry, React, HubSpot, Stripe, Shopify, Java, C#
Awards
- Amusement & Music Operators Association Innovator Award, 2012
- Emmy, Interactive Television, Current TV, 2007
- Webby, Best Practices, Current TV, 2007
- Incomplete List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, University of Illinois, Multiple Awards
Education
University of Illinois, Urbana, IL
Master of Computer Science
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science; Honors
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