SCO - Otherwise known as self checkout

If you have ever seen or used a self checkout at Walmart, Target, etc. This is something I worked on. The latest versions are Linux based and a microservice architecture...I was involved in that modernization. I worked across a diverse variety of languages: C, C++, Java, Go, and JS...effectively working up and down the entire stack.

A few highlights I suppose...I worked with the platform team on debugging application to kernel\driver specific interactions. I worked on optimizing and debugging virtualized implementations for edge compute servers. I wrote custom tooling performance analysis in V8 to analyze the interactions the interactions with the C++. Was the engineering lead for the automation on the product so all the automated testing (I personally barely wrote a single test)...I wrote the libraries for testing, tools for tracing application behavior, k8s integrations to make it scale, worked with multiple service teams for emulation of hardware\components, and the CI\CD pipelines for the services. And of yes...I worked on the implementation of the document\receipt parsing so if you have ever held a receipt in your hand from a self checkout system you are holding something I worked on.

Honestly, I'm proud of the work done during my time there.

Rise

Prior to Perficient's acquisition Rise was an intranet platform designed to make workflows easier for customers. Effectively a very elegant software layer that abstracted away some of the ugliness of SharePoint. And in my humble opinion it did quite well.

I worked on Rise for just short of a couple years during my time at Perficient before ultimately departing in 2021. Working on the various components involved that a customer may want and the like.

Prior to Rise I worked on greenfield experiments around new patterns and designs to microservice architectures. This would have been...2018-2019. I would like to believe the techniques learned from this were useful in developing more resilient software faster. If I look at the vaulation and eventually company aquisition of the company in 2024 it definitely did not hurt.

My thesis

During my time in university I worked on a research project in offensive cybersecurity. Specifically studying the effectiveness of teaching offensive security techniques and their likelihood of finding exploits or resulting in a compromise.

I actually greatly enjoyed the challenges of this work. And overall I do enjoy pentesting projects I am on (with the explicit permission of my employer) as well as addressing security issues whether they be bugs or my design.

This thesis was completed as part of an honors program at Ball State University. The paper with redactions\sensitive info removed is available on Ball State's Website. If you cannot load the link and would like a copy please feel free to send me an email.

Indiana Bicentennial

This is an old project that is no longer operating, but this is what happens when you are in the industry long enough. Random old projects effectively disappear.

For context I am originally from Indiana and I was working at a dev shop in 2016 who was requested to build an application for educational purposes to celebrate the 200 years since Indiana was admited to the union. And oh boy this reflective of the time.

The idea was simple we would build an app that could run on iPad devices in classrooms in multiple schools in Indiana, I believe the main target age for this was 8th graders at the time (also means someone who used my code might actually be reading this at 23-24). This app would present education information about the state and handle an interaction video stream that would be broadcast on the day of the bicentennial.

For context I worked on analytics systems and the admin panel for the actual livestream. I would also work on some performance sensitive parts of the mobile app to get that working correctly.

The later is it's own conversation having a mix of Objective-C, Swift, and C++ that are somehow supposed performing optimally on what I believe would have been...second or third generation iPads being optimisitic...first generation in the worst case scenario as technically they were all supported.

The prior is also a conversation because given number of schools who were using this app there was some black magic involved to get the data in a performant manner.

We also learned that video encoding and streaming which is...much harder than YouTube or Twitch make it look, but...we did it. The application went live without a hitch...a few virtual machines deployed with a load balancer in front offloading tasks across a PHP and NodeJS (realtime data) APIs while people used the admin panel written in AngularJS 1.0. Interactions in the panel could cause animations on the screens of users, absolutely wild for the time.

Yeah this project was from 10 years ago, but it was an experience in building resilent, scalable systems, and doing so on a tight timeline. While the tech has changed today, the lessons and designs have not rather they have just evolved further.

Verzion

I'm going to list this project because while the position is no longer on my resume at this point I do think it is an interesting one to talk about.

During university one of the systems I worked on was the fiber optic maintenance system for the East Coast of Verizon. I had relocated to another different state for a summer during this.

Understandably I really can't talk much about this in detail here, but I am mentioning it due to the level of impact.

Orka

Orka is currently a product produced by Macstadium. It is effectively kubevirt, but for Mac hardware.

I worked on Orka for about a year working on hypervisors, kubelets, vm\guest tools, and operators.