Be Deliberate

I make new things. That way I never stop learning & never stop growing.

All things that are made are hopefully designed. On purpose. Even when they're not deliberately finessed the decision to not concern yourself with the details is a design decision. I roast my own coffee, I smoke my own BBQ, I make my own cheese, I write my own code, I think about my interfaces, & I make instruments. In each of the things I've worked on - no matter what the skills required - engineering & design is fundamental.

As a child I watched my dad build a house (which he helped design and engineered) with the assistance of many family & friends joining in. I watched in awe as the building elements came together & what was dirt became covered in concrete & what was concrete became covered with wood & tubing & wires. Each layer of these materials was designed & intentionally placed together to create a home... that I never got to live in because we moved to Nevada.

Growing up I was fascinated by the the way things worked and how they were designed. I would take apart, put together, & build upon things; Bicycles, baseball cards, the layout for the newspaper I delivered, & eventually automobiles (especially trucks). I designed half-pipes & bike ramps, slot car bodies (I needed to win with a better, purer wedge), & broken things became designs to investigate. I composed music for the piano, the guitar, & - much to my brother's disappointment - I played a lot of drums.

As an adult software architecture, graphic design, & user experience design combined together on the Internet & I became obsessed with what was then the cutting edge technology of the HTML3 & early JavaScript. As the web browsers of yester-year developed into sophisticated platforms for application deployment the user experience went from clickable links & simple forms into massive Single Page Applications (SPA's). I love engineering and designing those, too.

My Core Principles for Design (A Sort of Manifesto)

It seems trendy lately that everything that's a movement should have a manifesto. What if I have some things that motivate me that I hope resonate with you? These are my principles to live by for design:

1. Design with empathy. Put yourself in your users' shoes. If they're all on desktop devices with large monitors then you may be able to save time with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), but as soon as the first person uses your web page/app on a mobile device they're going to get frustrated.
2. Design deliberately. If love is your primary mission, then choose to make loving design choices. If you find yourself going with the default, you're probably not deliberately loving through design.
3. Design toward the "&". Often we find ourselves divided between speed & size, functional & quick, artistic & legible. Instead of one or the other bring them together. Be the force for "&."
4. Designing the new is not abandoning the familiar. Those who are artistic often find themselves craving the new [I live this in my life], but we learn by analogy, so we need something familiar to make ease of use & ease of learning possible. This doesn't mean we can't do something new & unfamiliar if it is absolutely required, but learn from Windows 8: don't take away the familiar to be different.

Leading the Way

Throughout my career I've had the opportunity to lead and mentor teams and individuals. I have been a lead engineer, a scrum master and an engineering manager. I'm not interested in the title, but I am interested in building out the best projects with people who are learning and growing alongside me. I have been mentoring others for over two decades and am grateful for thos who have mentored me as well. As they say, "We stand on the shoulders of giants."

Some Thoughts on Accountability

Early in my pursuit of leadership opportunities I was asked the common interview question, "What is your greatest strength and greatest weakness?" I answered honestly at the time that accountability was difficult for me because I always associated it with disciplinary measures. I got candid feedback from that interview process that this answer was a primary reason why I did not get the role. I set about to fix that: I studied and internalized my own working definition of accountability.

1. Clarity of value Don't do work that doesn't need to be done. Make sure that the work you're doing matters.
2. Clarity of work Before you execute you need to make sure you understand the work and that you won't be spinning your wheels trying to figure out what actually needs to be delivered.
3. Clarity of timeline Make sure that you know when things are due and should be demoed. I can't ask you how things are going - or tell someone else how they're going - and have a sense of urgency without there being a known deadline. I've seen projects slip and slip and slip over the years because the timeline wasn't a clear part of the conversation. Clear work can be linked to clear timelines.
4. Clarity of rewards & consequences This part of the definition was really muddy for me (a lack of clarity, you could say) early on. I wanted to also be able to integrate celebration and rewards into what my team is doing, not just negative consequences. We may need negative consequences. Those are real. They're just not the only part of doing clear work.
5. Delivery Once you hit the timelines and everyone is anxious to show off their work through demos and deployments you need to deliver the software. With SAAS being a common deployment method now delivery is commonly a deployment, but it may be a build and bundle so that customers can install the software. Delivery is key. Get the items across the finish line as a team and have the conversations around the rewards and consequences.

Some Thoughts on Agile/Scrum

Standing up for agile is a big deal. In The Scrum Guide the founders of scrum tell us three things about it:

1. Scrum is lightweight
2. Scrum is simple to understand
3. Scrum is difficult to master

The challenges for scrum/agile are discipline, dedication, and deliberate culture. It isn't that companies and their leadership and employees can't grasp agile, it is that they need to fully commit themselves to the process. I'm dedicated to servant leadership. Let me care for my team and we will flourish together making agile one of the tent stakes of culture.

Part of my design for the standup meeting is to not only include the three main questions, but one fourth question that helps build up trust in the team. What kind of question is this fourth question? It is a personal, but not invasive, question such as: Do you prefer cookie, cake, or ice cream? This kind of question allows people to share tiny bits of themselves and break down the barriers that teams can have and it lets people see each other as humans that they can know, and not just a co-worker. Let me serve you, help you grow, and see you excel. Together we can change the world.

The Web is Ever Changing - Engineer for That

I moved to Texas from Nevada in 1999. The Internet became an obvious place for me to save time when I was first trying to communicate with family from all over the United States because I could write the same stories & events in one place: I wrote a dynamic website so that I could have an easy to maintain blog. I could write my stories, put them in a database & then retrieve them. WordPress quickly rose to prominence & I wrote a migrator from my home-rolled system to WordPress. In WordPress 1.2 they added a plugin system for which I wrote an introductive set of articles (which is still one of my largest blog traffic sources). Shortly thereafter a traffic statistics package I wrote, StatTraq, was introduced to the world & became a very popular plugin for the WordPress ecosystem. I learned a lot from that project, but had to transfer ownership of it once my first daughter was born.

WorldClient

In Texas I started working for a great company, Alt-N Technologies, that really let me learn & grow at anything I wanted to [that had a business need]. If you ever get a chance to work for a company that is supportive, transparent, & innovating left & right you'll understand what it's like to thrive at your workplace. Alt-N makes several pieces of software, but one of them is a webmail application, WorldClient, that is bundled with their MDaemon mail server. At the time HTML4 was "new" & Internet Explorer was the king of the browsers. One of the crowning achievements in my early career was creating a web-based email client that felt a lot like a desktop email client. Panels could be resized, message lists showed up in a grid, & it used early versions of Microsoft's ActiveX component to do AJAX for dynamic data delivery.

Accessibility

In 2004 I was able to go to South By South-West (SXSW) & see a few key presentations that changed my perspective on the web: I watched Jason Fried's talk on User Experience & I watched a blind man use a text-to-speech plugin live. The user experience designs that Fried was so passionate about have become best practices & industry standards today since then, but were revolutionary at the time. However, still today we find ourselves faced with an Internet that focuses on flash-bang content with far too little concern for accessibility. I hope that I leave this planet a lot more accessible to web content for those with differing abilities. At one point in time one of the state accessibility agencies reached out & we worked together to help improve the accessibility of WorldClient for its users.

Responsive Design

The WorldClient project was getting more & more demand for webmail access on smart phones & tablets & I was able to use responsive design to help make a one-size-fits-all solution. The same theme would scale & dynamically the menu and its contents would change to show the best presentation to users. In addition this theme was very light weight & had a very high performance experience on low-bandwidth connections such as dial-up. Not everyone understands responsive design, but it is often both accessible to those with special needs & accessible to those with lots of access needs from different devices.

Performance

Using a webmail client can be painful due to performance concerns, & doing anything over the web can introduce sensitivity to network traffic, bandwidth restrictions, & latency from added hops. So I worked hard to use best practices to reduce the number of requests, compress files, & optimize loading time through asynchronous, on-demand, requests for data & supporting infrastructure. I was able to work with the team to move the needle down so that users were able to save hours of their lives not waiting for their webmail.

Internationalization

Internationalization (I18N) is a constant opportunity to re-think design. There are a number of questions that should be asked & I love exploring what the impacts of those questions are:

• What languages will your users be reading & understanding?
• Is that language left-to-right or right-to-left?
• Do the colors that you have chosen reflect anything you didn't intend in another culture?

SecurityGateway

Alt-N was creating an a solution for spam & message content filtering called SecurityGateway. I learned a lot about SPA's during the creation of the WorldCient webmail themes I worked on. I was able to build up my own framework & infrastructure to build a new project in. Using XML + XSLT on the server side we could create XHTML documents & use the untraslated XML for API requests. This is still one of the applications I'm most proud of.

There are a few key parts of what made SecurityGateway's usability excellent:

• AJAX (Also known As "Web 2.0") allowed us to load things up asynchronously. While normal by today's standards, this was another place where we stood out compared to competitors such as Barricuda.
• We kept asking ourselves, "What if we had never used this product before but knew what outcome we wanted?" This resulted in the landing pages which put into words activities you'd want to do.
• We knew that the sieve rules engine was going to need to be able to have complex configuration, but we needed to keep the user interface simple. To accomplish this we needed a nested list view. While the nested list view was a challenge to code, the outcome was a pretty usable interface that allowed for dragging and dropping of rows for rule re-ordering.

Randy Peterman - Senior Software Developer

Skills & Tools

• 24+ years of experience as a leader, developer & software craftsman
• Agile Project Management through Jira, Agile Central (formerly Rally) & Kanban boards, User Story development & refinement to maximize team comprehension
• Frontend development with MUI, Tailwind, Bootstrap + HTML5 + CSS3 with Angular & Vue.js
• Server side development with TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, PHP, MongoDB & MySQL
• Automated testing with Cypress.io & Jest

Work History

Ensomata

Engineering Manager/Senior Full Stack Engineer

• As engineering manager, I assumed leadership of my team and worked to help build the skillset and drive closure of work items across our team
• Engaged with other engineering leadership to help solidify best practices and enhance engineering culture around AI integration in software engineering
• Low-Code implementation for metrics report emails to reach roles across the organization to help drive clarity on progress and areas for growth
• Performance monitoring and optimization across the application
• Financial report automation
• Built out AWS Infrastructure across multiple installations using CDK
  • Multiple data sources via DMS for ETL
  • CI/CD with AWS Code Pipelines
  • API & Frontend Server deployment
• Ensured data security to maintain HIPAA compliance
• Migrated legacy Perl system to TypeScript for modernization and efficiency for cross-team development

Encamp

Senior Full Stack Engineer

• Collaborated with EHS specialists to help customers get disparate data into a uniform data set to meet regulatory compliance requirements
• Lead initiatives to build out new revenue opportunities in a fast-growing startup environment building on top of AWS Lambda, DynamoDB & Node.js
• Monthly software hygiene, code reviews, team architecture & engineering discussions
• Hiring & onboarding programs as well as various volunteering opportunities to help keep company culture thriving

CSG International

Senior Full Stack Developer

• Collaborated with international teams (Bolivia and India) on a complex multi-application interface written in Angular 7
• Helped drive agile change initiative
• Agile Coaching and education through multiple training initiatives
• Cross-team intake participant to help gauge incoming requests for SoW contracts
• Training and onboarding lead to help get other teams onto the new platform
• Led initiative around Accelerate DevOps capabilities

Boeing/Jeppesen

Senior Frontend Engineer

• Collaborated with UxD, Project Owners, & Project Management to understand product needs
• Lead initiative to integrate analytics into Angular projects
• Integrated SASS into branding to help multiple products the same source repository
• Lead daily standups for cross functional teams to make sure progress was consistent

Cisco Systems January 2014 ‐ 2017

• Scrum Master on Diameter Mobile Policy Server team of 11
• Lead QA sub-group of Scrum Team to help ensure code coverage & software functionality
• R&D on project developing Dropwizard-based JSON API for remote installation & configuration of complex multi-VM application ecosystem
• R&D Project proving out the viability of Vue.js, Backbone, or Angular.js in new UI for User Experience & Usability initiative for complex Java-based application; included Scrum Master duties for team.

Key Projects

Scrum Master on Policy Server Diameter Team

CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)

Currently leading team through project commitments, user story planning, sprints burn down, acceptance completion & sprint retrospectives & demos. Team is across the US as well as in India.

Policy Builder Usability Re-write

CakePHP, MongoDB, jQuery 1.9, Angular 1.x, Vue.js 0.1x

Responsibilities included client side & server side application architecture, componentized UI implementation, UX, & research into frameworks & templating options for rapid application development.

Orchestration & Installation APIs

Java, Dropwizard.io, Mongo, Angular 1.x

Collaborated with several teams integrating new server side components to create an API for existing server side architectures to allow custom installations of policy software.

Alt-N Technologies September 2000-December 2014

• Team Lead & developer for market leading browser based email applications
• Key presenter at sales & development conferences
• Engaged customers through various sources to improve user experience
• Passionate evangelist within RIM for
  • Adoption of HTML5, CSS3 & SVG
  • Exploring user interaction with devices through 3D spatial interaction with accelerometer enabled devices
• R&D for both browser & backend work in C++.
• Frontend targets include desktop browsers, tablet browsers & mobile browsers. WorldClient includes Email, Contact, Calendar, Tasks, Notes & Instant Messaging integration through the browser.
• Part of hiring & interviewing team for Development & QA

Key Projects

WorldClient for MDaemon

HTML5, CSS3, WCML templating language, JavaScript

Responsibilities as developer involved both server & client side development. Cutting edge AJAX work & performance improvements helped lead to sales growth. Led various interns & Jr. Developers through R&D projects.

SecurityGateway 1.0

C++, Firebird SQL Server, XML+XSLT templating, JavaScript, HTML4, CSS2.1

Responsibilities included client side application architecture, component design & implementation, graphic design as well as server side work on data I/O & software performance. SecurityGateway is an anti-spam, anti-virus email gateway that lets organizations who use mail servers such as Microsoft Exchange reduce wasted server resources & create email management rules to help reduce the number of hours spent by staff managing mail related tasks.

WorldClient Pro 3

HTML4, MSSQL, WCML templating language, JavaScript

Responsibilities as developer started with migrating templates & themes to use the new template engine & database backend as well as implement new functionality.

Consulting & Volunteer Work

I have done a number of consulting jobs over the years. Helping with online shopping carts, podcasts, web applications, front-end work, & product photography. I have worked on backends for church websites to help them get a message database up & running & allow for greater access to content across the globe. If you would like to get references for these sorts of gigs please reach out for more information.

I have spent a cumulative number of weeks of my life speaking in front of people at church, at corporate presentations, & have traveled internationally (disclosure: I went to Canada from the U.S.) to present. I have taught at youth groups & spoken at various special events. If you're looking for someone with communication skills, I might be better than average.

Open Source

My github profile doesn't show all the work I've done over the years (some things should go away), but I've had code in the HTML5Shim project (for the HTML meter element). Check it out!

Education

• Western Nevada College - Associate of Arts - 1996-1999
• Tyndale Theological Seminary - 1999-2001