Ben Smith

Ben Smith

Software Engineer

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About Me

I'm a software engineer with a passion for continuous delivery, distributed applications and data driven decisions. I favor small and rapid iterations and product aligned engineering teams. I started programming as a hobby at the age 13, doing front end development back in 1998. I have worked and developed on several platforms professionally including WebSphere Portal, Tomcat, Apache web server, z/OS mainframe to cloud based workloads using kubernetes, lambda, dynamodb and other aws services.

Latest Projects

Linq Forms & Workflows Linq

  • Acted as a key technical resource for product owners and engineers, aiding in the refinement and execution of product strategies.
  • Spearheaded the design and implementation of technical solutions, driving product updates and enhancements to enhance user engagement and streamline operations.
  • Bridged the gap between technical and non-technical teams by translating intricate technical details into clear, actionable insights that guided strategic product decisions.
  • Coordinated communications and project timelines between the software team and other technical groups,ensuring effective collaboration and adherence to best practices.
  • Mentored junior engineers, providing guidance on coding practices, project management, and career development, resulting in enhanced team capabilities.
  • Analyzed and addressed challenges independently, collaborating with the team to devise and implement effective solutions.
  • Upgraded backend services from Spring 2.7 to 3.x
  • Worked on an AngularJS and Angular frontend.
  • Managed workloads in AWS running on ECS.

Current technologies

  • Main Programming Languages: Java, Typescript
  • Compute Infrastructure:ECS Fargate
  • Data: MySQL(RDS), DynamoDB, OpenSearch and S3.
  • Event/Messaging: SNS/SQS.
  • DevOps: Azure DevOps for CI and deployments, DataDog for monitoring and observability. AWS CloudFormation infrastructure provisioning.

Past Projects

Enhanced VINE (Victim Information and Notification Everyday) Appriss Insights

  • Evangelize rapid automated testing. Increased test feedback loop from roughly 2 weeks to one day for E2E test and develop integration test to run on code commits.
  • Led the way for my team on automating deployments and advocated the use of feature flags to decouple deployments from functionality releases.
  • Used Infrastructure as code to provision new infrastructure.
  • Worked with the product team to analyze and write technical requirements.
  • Develop applications that replaced legacy VINE applications. Supporting over 33 million notifications and 201 million searches a year.
  • Assisted with migrating state agencies off Classic(Legacy) VINE.
  • Part of a Business Unit being acquired by Equifax for $1.8 billion.

Technologies

  • Main Programming Languages: Java, Node/Typescript
  • Compute Infrastructure:Kubernetes(EKS/EC2), Lambda
  • Data: Postgres(RDS), DynamoDB and S3.
  • Event/Messaging: Postgres(RDS), DynamoDB and S3.
  • DevOps: Bamboo for CI, ArgoCD for deployments, Liquibase for RDBMS schema updates, Open Telemetry and signalFx for monitoring and observability. AWS CDK, CDK8s and serverless for infrastructure provisioning.

Anomaly Engine Rivera Group

Worked on a 3 person feature team to implement anomaly detection models using WSO2 Machine Learner and WSO2 Data Analytics Server to do complex event processing with the dynamically generated ML models.

Eagle 6 Rivera Group

Worked on the core eagle 6 UI team, implement a web front end using angularJS. Worked closely with UI/UX designers and back end team members to design and implement technical solution for UI designs and requested features from business. Also implemented a SVG graph/diagrams render with Java and yFiles library to be used in the front end.

Product Assortment Solutions, LLC - Portal Site

Portal Site for internal and external customer use

project name
Portal

Design, Develop and Implement portal site to allow internal users to manage user, companies and products.

Here is a demo PAS did in Janury of an early version of the portal. Please note this is an older version portal which conatains serval more freatures.

Portal Site Theme and Portlet Opitmiztion NTT Data

Optimize Portal Themes and applications to reduce response times.

Pizza Hut Book IT! Teacher Enrollment App and Classroom Enrollment App Yum! Brands

Add online enrollment for PH BookIT! teachers. This steamline enrollment and allowed enrollment informaton to be inserted to a database and enrollment emails to be automated. Previous this was done manually and information was keyed in.

WebSphere Portal Upgrade (Yum! Brands) Yum! Brands

Assisted with Webshphere Portal upgrade from v6.1.5 to v8. Help remediated applicatons, WCM assets and themes.

Work Experience

Sr./Principal Software Engineer - Appriss Insights (Jan 2017 - Present)

Currently a back end engineering lead for EVINE. Initiate technical/process designs and improvements with other teams and team members. Facilitate sharing new ideas to cross pollinate knowledge across teams.

Software Engineer - Rivera Group (June 2015 - Jan 2017)

Worked with business and design teams to implement software solutions for the eagle 6 platform.

Web App Developer and Consultant - Ben Smith Consulting (Self-Employed) (May 2014 - June 2015)

Web, application, software and implementation development. Design and develop interactive web solutions. Application optimization and server performance. Specializing in front end java (including Spring) development and server management.

Lead Portal Developer (Sr Application Developer) - NTT DATA (Aug 2013 - Oct 2014)

Work with clients designing and developing Java Web Applications and WCM components. Assited support members with critical issues. Migrated applications and WCM content to WebSphere Portal v8 from WebSphere Portal v6.1.5. WebSphere Portal theme development and remediation.

Application Developer/Sr Application Developer- Yum! Brands (Jul 2011 - Aug 2013)

Work with clients designing and developing Java Web Applications and WCM components. Assited support members with critical issues. Migrated applications and WCM content to WebSphere Portal v8 from WebSphere Portal v6.1.5. WebSphere Portal theme development and remediation.

Intern- Yum! Brands (Jan 2008 - July 2011)

Intern for PeopleSoft HR and Payroll team. Decision Support Reporting Team and Web Applications team.