Jeff Clark - Software Engineering Generalist

Who I Am and What I Do

If you want to read, what a much better writer than I wrote, about the ethos that I subscribe to, read Hacking is Important

The Standard Stuff

I have more than 25 years of professional experience in all aspects of software engineering. I am a former expert in writing gripping opening statements and a current Software Engineering Generalist. Seriously though, I love the tactics of engineering: being in the code, solving real problems, and building software that people use; but I also thrive on helping shape the strategy and vision of small software companies and providing leadership to make it all go.

I am a pragmatist and believe that too much modern software is over-designed and over-engineered. You can support a lot more users and traffic than you might imagine with a simple node.js back-end and a sqlite database.

I have a great deal of experience working remote. I have worked remote either part-time or full-time for the past 18 years. The pandemic has brought forth the need for a greater understanding of the challenges and benefits of remote work. I really enjoy helping companies and individuals succeed with remote work.

Tech & Skills

• People: management, leadership, strategy, you name it
• Tech: many languages and platforms/stacks over the years
• Buzz Words: SaaS, Cloud, DevOps, ML - Oh My!

Please, No

• security-clearance
• dogma

Work History

Co-Founder & All Things Technical - gallformers.org

Remote - August 2020 → Present

TypeScript ◦ next.js ◦ Bootstrap ◦ Sqlite ◦ AWS ◦ Rust ◦ Open Source

Co-founded gallformers.org an organization and website to catalog and help folks identify plant galls in North America. I built the site from scratch and continue to enhance and maintain it. It is a relatively low traffic site (plant galls are not yet the new birding :) ), but there is a core of dedicated users. The user base is split between those that are trying to identify a gall and those that are building out the database. At least 50% of the work is not visible to most users as it is all administration stuff: creating/editing galls, taxonomy, hosts, sources, etc.

This is a passion project for me and my co-founder. Currently I fund all operating costs out of my pocket with the goal of spreading knowledge and infusing more interest in these fascinating creations.

The application runs on a DigitalOcean droplet as a next.js server backed by a sqlite database. I am currently working on the first standalone service for the site, a wrapper around USDA and Vascan plant range data APIs so that we can have up to data plant range information in our database. This service is written in Rust and I am really enjoying using Rust, though it does have a learning curve.

Sr. Eng Manager -> Interim Director of Platform Engineering at Care.com

Remote - January 2022 → Present

golang ◦ Java ◦ AWS ◦ Typescript ◦ Next.js ◦ GraphQL ◦ Kubernetes

Lead a delivery team working on Care's real-time messaging platform and search before being asked to run the Platform Engineering org on an interim basis.

VP, Engineering at Syniti formerly Backoffice Associates

Remote - July 2015 → March 2020

golang ◦ python ◦ C# ◦ postgresql ◦ AWS ◦ ElasticSearch ◦ DevOps ◦ SaaS ◦ SAP ◦ Enterprise

Lead and transformed the engineering team, culture, and products at Syniti. Bootstrapped a totally new culture centered on CI/CD, modern tooling, and SaaS. This required introducing automated testing and quality, DevOps, DVCS (git), Cloud (AWS), new languages (Go, Python), and infusing a new culture centered on building great products.

I owned and directed all of Syniti's overall strategic technology/architecture direction and vision. I was a frequent contributor to the Board's Technical Committee, preparing and presenting on various topics as part of the quarterly board meetings. I also helped the company through an acquisition, preparing and working through due diligence and other similar activities.

Another large part of my role was to be the primary leader making sure that a transition from several offices across North America to a fully remote workforce was successful.

Principal Software Architect at Content Analyst Company

Reston, VA - Aug 2012 → July 2015

java ◦ scala ◦ akka ◦ postgresql ◦ AWS ◦ ElasticSearch ◦ Text Analysis ◦ SaaS

As the one of the senior engineers and architect, I was responsible for helping bridge that tough divide between the vision of the Executives and the realities of execution by an engineering team. I also provided senior leadership through code reviews, mentoring, design reviews, and such. I was hands-on and in the code on a daily-basis. I helped the company pivot from a pure API/SDK company to an end-user SaaS product built on the AWS cloud.

Content Analyst built (was acquired) text analytics tools for working with large sets of unstructured data. The primary market is e-discovery where the tools help with many of the aspects of e-discovery (early case assessment, review, etc.). These tools are both heuristic-based (email-threading) as well as more traditional math-based analysis tools (latent-semantic indexing for conceptual search and classification).

Co-Owner/All Around Tech Guy at Behaviors for Life

Fairfax, VA - 2008 → 2012

Objective-C ◦ iOS ◦ OSX ◦ Mac

My wife and I founded a company that created software to help teach language to children with special needs, in particular Autism. My wife is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and works daily with children that have autism. She was constantly complaining about how awful it was to manually sort language cards as well as how error-prone it was. Meanwhile, a company that many love to hate and many more just love released two amazing devices, the iPhone and the iPad. Suddenly it was clear, utilize this amazing technology to solve the problems that my wife, and many like her have.

Software Architect at SOALogix

Reston, VA - 2004 → 2008

Java ◦ Linux ◦ JVM ◦ Scala ◦ Groovy ◦ SAP ◦ Primavera ◦ Enterprise

Led the technical development and architecture of a SOA-based enterprise integration tool suite that connected Primavera to SAP and other ERP-type applications. I designed and wrote the entire original code base in just under 2 months. This was made possible by abandoning the original plan of using EJBs and embracing the then brand new concept of dependency injection using Spring.

I introduced Groovy and Scala to the technical stack to solve problems with asynchronous message passing (Scala Actors) and for adapter scripting (Groovy).

The company was eventually acquired by SAP.

Software Architect at AtStaff

Reston, VA - 2001 → 2004

.NET ◦ C# ◦ C++ ◦ Windows ◦ SQL Server ◦ MFC ◦ ASP ◦ ASP.NET

Responsible for the overall technical development and direction of a healthcare scheduling application. Mentored technical staff, developed and documented the software architecture, and did hands on coding tasks. The technical platform was Windows, .NET 1.0, SQL Server, ASP, MFC, and C++

Director of Development / Software Engineer at MSI Software

Reston, VA - 1996 → 2001

.NET ◦ C# ◦ C++ ◦ Windows ◦ SQL Server ◦ MFC ◦ ASP ◦ ASP.NET

Led a department of Software Engineers, QA, and Technical Documentation specialists in the ongoing evolution and maintenance of two healthcare scheduling applications. Reported to the CEO and participated in day-to-day tactical management as well as strategic business efforts.

Led the technical effort to turn a desktop scheduling application into an enterprise scheduling application. This involved componentization of the architecture, moving to a RDBMS back-end (SQL Server), and implementing a DCOM based remoting tunnel. Also heavily involved in the development of requirements for the product as well as day-to-day coding tasks. The technical platform was Windows, SQL Server, MFC, and C++

Education & Certifications

B.S. Mathematics minor in Computer Science - Georgia State University

Atlanta, GA - 1994 → 1996

C ◦ Ada ◦ Scheme ◦ Pascal ◦ UNIX ◦ Data Structures ◦ Algorithms

• Reluctant Student, graduated in 3 years.
• Failed my first computer class, Intro to Computers, for attendance reasons. Had final average of 102 in the class, still was failed. Pedants are not my friends.
• Pi mu epsilon award for outstanding achievement in the field of Mathematics.
• Tutored in the math lab for pizza and beer money. Tutored students in many subjects, including some that I never took a class in, including Discrete Math.

Functional Programming Principles in Scala

EPFL - Martin Odersky - 2013

Scala ◦ Functional Programming

Material That Has Shaped Me

• Effective Java: Programming Language Guide (Java Series) - Joshua Bloch - After 8 years of C++ I came to Java, on-the-job, with almost no experience with the language. I bought far too many Java books. This was the only one that ended up paying for itself, and it did so many, many times over.
• Real World Haskell - Bryan O'Sullivan, John Goerzen, Don Stewart - Functional programming! What is this craziness? Wait a minute, why don't all my languages work this way.
• The Joy of Clojure: Thinking the Clojure Way - Michael Fogus, Chris Houser - I never got to use Clojure like I wanted. Not being a Lisper it is a bit of a hill to climb but I love the idea of programming with data rather than objects a-la OOP.
• Purely Functional Data Structures - Chris Okasaki - Changed the way I think about immutability in conjunction with expressive and powerful programming.
• Programming Rust - Jim Blandy, Jason Orendorff - Everything that Golang claims to be plus a real type system with generics and thus a powerful collections implementation. Yeah you have to think about ownership aka memory management but it is not that hard!
• Rands In Repose: Hacking is Important - Tech Life A disruptive act
• Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity’s virtues over easiness’, showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.
• My first computer was a Commodore 64 - this plus my dad's subscription to BYTE magazine forged my eventual path.