Bob Fejes

TechPunch — Denver, Colorado

Owner, Principal Engineer, Programmer, Architect, Mentor

Techpunch is my LLC that gives me the legal structure to contract directly with companies.

Currently building a greenfield finance application for researching and organizing investment research and opportunities, written 100% in Clojure/ClojureScript, targeting AWS and Cloudflare clouds.

Completed Project: ADT — February 2017 - March 2020

Worked on a small, powerhouse engineering team at ADT to deliver Alexa and Google Home apps allowing ADT customers to interact with security systems and smart devices via voice. Designed and built high-profile systems using Clojure, Java & Ruby. Integrated security panels, smart door locks, lighting, thermostats, sensors, cameras and garage door controllers.

I was the senior go-to Clojure engineer, designing and building significant application code and REST APIs, and communicating designs to other engineers. Mentored others engineers on design and implementation best practices. Helped other engineers write clean, understandable code that performs better by extensively reviewing code, asking thought-provoking questions about design choices, approaches and tradeoffs, and helping them develop the habit of asking the right questions of themselves and others.

Built an API that aggregates distributed, disparate events and allows internal and external clients to query, fetch, stream, and subscribe to events in a simple, common way.

Apps and APIs are composed of several distributed, scalable web services, serving about 100,000 active users — the busiest Java service doing about 10 million requests/day and the busiest Clojure service about 2.7 million requests/day.

Runs in AWS, using EC2, S3, RDS, Lambdas, DynamoDB (a Key-Value/NoSQL/Document DB), ElastiCache Redis, Postgres. Implemented Alexa Custom Skills and Smart Home Skills, as well as Google's Actions and api.ai/Dialogflow/Home/Assistant platforms; heavy OAuth integration with a wide variety of systems, acting as both server and client.

After demonstrating early success with a few Alexa features, we were chosen as Amazon's preferred home security partner for Alexa. I worked closely with Amazon, including travel to their Seattle offices, as they built Alexa support for the features we were building. Worked similarly with Google engineers over voice/video calls and email. Built relationships with key people at both Amazon and Google in their voice projects.

Other Notable Projects

Critical software applications in Health Care, Sales, Education, Marketing, Telecom, Real Estate and Entertainment:

• USHomeGo — 2016: rescued a Ruby/Rails project where the original developer left and app stopped working — restored app fuctionality, and added new features allowing the owner to expand deeper into the real estate FSBO tech market
• McKesson Health Solutions — 2012 - 2015: major enterprise Java project building a full-stack application heavily used by health care providers and insurance companies to authorize benefits for medical services
• Level 3 Communications — 2010 - 2011: Sr. Engineer building a full-stack Java & Flex application used by Level3's sales team to quote complex products and services for enterprise clients
• SafetyWeb — 2010: built and delivered Facebook javascript integration code for a since-acquired successful startup helping parents with child Internet use
• FL2 — Subaru's Share The Love Campaign — 2009: built all Facebook campaign javascript integration code for Subaru's national campaign through the former award-winning digital marketing firm FL2

Broad experience with people skills: management, sales, mentoring, teaching.

Twilio, Inc. — San Francisco, CA, remote from Denver, CO

Principal Software Engineer

Originally hired by the CIO, with whom I'd worked closely in the past, with a broad mission to solve an org-wide problem of spiking AWS costs.

• Intensely researched, diagrammed, and documented current disparate cloud strategies across the org. Approaches varied greatly across teams and acquisitions.
• Worked directly with dozens of people at all levels, across many roles and teams to assess the current state of the problem, and to socialize approaches and solutions.
• Formulated short-, medium-, and long-term plans for unified strategies to allow teams to get accurate data and notifications on their cloud costs, and to motivate them to care about costs.
• Worked directly with teams at Amazon AWS.
• Built a tool to automatically tag AWS resources with intelligent guessing, as well as make manual tagging of AWS resources easier across many AWS accounts.

Deal Pepper, Inc. — Denver, Colorado

VP of Software Development (including hands-on coding and UI/UX/product design)

Head of software development for a 7-person local startup with the mission of making web- and app-based deals a better experience for consumers. Company was acquired for a very small amount of money, but many invaluable lessons were learned about how to do a startup or new tech product, and bringing a new product to market.

Launched a robust product supporting 11,000+ users in under 5 months. Bore ultimate responsibility for all software development efforts. Management: managed the efforts of an internal senior developer, an external design team, technical vendors/services, and an external iPhone development firm. Recruited technical staff, and evaluated/selected technical vendors. Designed and prioritized application features in collaboration with marketing and business heads. Hands-on technical: UI/UX/product design and wireframing; object-oriented architecture; algorithm design; coded in Ruby on Rails/HTML/jQuery/Javascript; configured servers with Chef and other tools; tested with RSpec, factory_girl, WebRat, and SimpleCov; monitored application performance with New Relic; analyzed user behavior with ClickTale.

Technical system details: Ruby on Rails app hosted on 3+ Linux instances in "the cloud" on Engine Yard/Amazon EC2: 1+ app instances with Nginx and Passenger, a MySQL database, and a utility instance with Sphinx and Delayed Job. Chef recipes were used to configure boxes. App made automated interactive voice phone calls to business owners through interactive voice response (IVR) using the Twilio API/platform. System aggregated deals from dozens of deal providers by parsing feeds and scraping sites with Ruby scripts. Custom-built recommendation engine sent email to 90% of users every day matching their unique preferences. App interfaced with Amazon S3, IP-To-Geo translation service, Facebook, Google Maps, ClickTale, and Google Analytics. Back-end components included Sphinx for fast text and geo searching, Devise for authentication, Delayed Job for background processing, CarrierWave for file upload management, ImageMagick/MiniMagick for image manipulation, among others.

Datavantage, a subsidiary of Micros Inc. — Solon, Ohio

Sr. Software Development Consultant

Designed and developed high-performance, multi-tenant, commercial-grade software used by major national retail enterprises.

Designed key features for customer loyalty and promotions management within an enterprise portal system using Enterprise Java (JEE/J2EE), Liferay Enterprise Portal implementation of the Java Portlet API specification (JSR 168), JBoss & Jetty, Tomcat, Struts, Swing, Spring, Hibernate, Quartz, Oracle and Postgres. Developed under SuSE Linux. Tools included Eclipse, Ant, JUnit, CVS, CruiseControl, and JIRA. Interfaced with external applications via XML/SOAP Web Services.

Participated in all phases of the software development life cycle, including analysis, design, code, test, integration and implementation. The end product was a customer relationship management (CRM) system sold to Datavantage's large retail customer base, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Jos. A Bank, Zales, The North Face, Neiman Marcus, Kroger, Brownshoe, and H&M.

Northrop Grumman at NASA Glenn Research Center — Brook Park, Ohio

Lead Software Engineer for the Station Support Computer Module

I wrote software that still runs on the Space Station! Designed and wrote the main software for the Station Support Computer Module, a system of on-orbit displays and astronaut interfaces for the International Space Station Fluids and Combustion Facility. The Facility is a distributed system of embedded computers for conducting microgravity science experiments.

Designed and developed the foundational object-oriented software that allowed command, control, monitoring, and polling of the Facility.

Wrote over 30,000 lines of Java. Worked closely with fellow engineers to define system-wide requirements and protocols. Wrote requirements and design documents. Created and delivered presentations for software design reviews. Built models and diagrams including Use-Case, Class, State, Collaboration and Sequence Diagrams. Managed resources of a co-op student for useful project contributions. Created and maintained the Java flight software schedule.

Worked with a small team to design custom protocols for communication among distributed applications within the Facility and to the Space Station. Implemented the command and data protocols in C++ and Java using sockets, custom packets and support objects. Wrote over 3,000 lines of C++.

Rise Above It — Denver, CO

Pro Bono Developer/Technical Consultant

Developed website and admin app for a local non-profit cancer organization, which was used for years. Recruited and managed a modernizing redevelopment. Organization was merged into First Descents, a successful local cancer non-profit.

Programmer/Consultant/Techie

Various small emergency and miscellaneous projects including an ETL project for the Business Objects/Crystal Decisions merger; porting a PalmOS game to Win32 for Oopdreams Software; building a web knowledge base for SprintPCS.com; ETL for Business Objects' Salesforce.com CRM database; technical consultation for Case Western Reserve University School of Law for a case involving Internet security and identity theft.