Jason P. Voegele

May 2017 – January 2018

As a senior backend Elixir developer at MeetEdgar, I was a member of the Ropig engineering team. Ropig is a new alert management system built on Elixir, Phoenix, GraphQL, and the Google Cloud Platform. Specific responsibilities included:

• Implement GraphQL APIs using Elixir, Absinthe, Phoenix, and Ecto.
• Create asynchronous backend services for sending alert notification messages using Elixir, GenStage, Google Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Datastore, SendGrid (for email), and Twilio (for SMS).
• Create and maintain open-source Elixir libraries available on hex.pm: external_service and wait_for_it
• Contribute several bug fixes and performance improvements to Kane and Diplomat, the open-source Elixir libraries for interacting with Google Pub/Sub and Cloud Datastore, respectively.
• Write blog articles about Elixir development on the Ropig Engineering Blog

May 2015 – April 2017

As a Senior Software Development Engineer at Basho, I was a member of the Riak core team. Riak, a distributed, fault-tolerant, NoSQL database, is written primarily in Erlang. My specific functions included:

• New feature development, performance enhancements, and bug fixes for Riak using Erlang and OTP.
• Test-driven development with EUnit, QuviQ's QuickCheck, and Basho's open source testing framework riak_test.
• Development of Riak's search component, known as Yokozuna, using distributed Solr as well as Erlang's gen_server, gen_fsm, and gen_event.
• Implementation of batching and asynchronous delivery of Solr operations for Yokozuna.
• Implementation of coordinated coverage query for efficiently listing object metadata across disparate nodes in cluster.
• Member of build and release management task force to optimize development workflow and reliability of build and release processes.

August 2014 – May 2015

As a software developer at Ahalogy, I was responsible for development and maintenance of an Internet-facing Ruby on Rails application, which allowed customers to effectively manage and monitor activity on their Pinterest account. Specific activities included:

• Implementation of RESTful JSON APIs using Ruby on Rails, which were consumed by a front end Ember.js app.
• Creation of a custom analytics solution based on Ruby, Sidekiq, Keen.io, and Cassandra, which gave customers insights into the performance of content.
• Processing of high volume event logs using a two-level caching scheme for data augmentation, which resulted in a 10× performance improvement over the previous implementation.
• Contributions to the open-source celluloid-pmap Ruby gem to use modern versions of RSpec and Celluloid and to fix a resource leak that led to runtime failures.

October 2013 – August 2014

Neo is a technology consulting agency specializing in digital product design and development. At Neo, all of our project work followed agile principles and practices with a particular emphasis on the Lean Startup methodology. This included Lean practices such as innovation accounting, validated learning, and build-measure-learn feedback loops, as well as such agile development practices as pair programming and test-driven development.

Specific clients and projects included:

Cooking Light Diet

In collaboration with a cross-functional team of developers, designers, and product owners, created cookinglightdiet.com, a service providing customized meal plans based on food preferences and calorie goals for thousands of subscribers. Technical architecture and components included:

• A suite of three Ruby on Rails applications communicating via RESTful JSON APIs
• Custom rules engine based on ActiveRecord Scopes
• Dynamic scale of Heroku dynos and workers using HireFire
• Background jobs using Resque, and later Sidekiq
• PostgreSQL arrays, JSON columns, and randomized result sets

See the Neo Case Study for further details.

Nexia™ Home Intelligence

In order to support up to 50,000 smart devices connected to Nexia's central operations, commissioned to fix or replace a Ruby-based communications bridge that was failing to perform sufficiently under load. Details of the solution included:

• Implemented a high throughput communications bridge for all of Nexia's customers' connected devices. The resulting system—based on Elixir, Erlang, RabbitMQ, and Redis—increased capacity by a factor of 50× compared to the Ruby system that it replaced.
• Created a connected device simulator and load testing harness with Google's Go programming language.
• Contributed a critical performance enhancement to the open source AMQP Ruby gem, resulting in a drastic 585× improvement in throughput of RabbitMQ channel allocation.

ICANN

As part of ICANN's effort to provide a more modern and interactive experience to their website, we designed and developed a completely new ICANN.org website using Ruby on Rails. Specific roles and responsibilities included:

• Co-instructed training course on Ruby and Rails programming for ICANN developers.
• Pair programmed with ICANN developers to provide ongoing mentoring.
• Provided training and mentoring of ICANN developers transitioning from Java to Ruby and Rails.
• Introduced caching in key areas of the site to improve scalability and eliminate bottlenecks.

November 2006 – October 2013

Terracotta is a software company that specializes in increasing scalability, availability, and performance of Big Data applications, primarily through use of its BigMemory product, an in-memory data management suite. In my roles as Release Engineer and Automation/Infrastructure Engineer, responsibilities included:

• Owned the build and test infrastructure and processes for Terracotta's flagship products: BigMemory, Ehcache, and Quartz.
• Managed a large-scale Jenkins continuous integration enviroment including dozens of slaves and thousands of jobs.
• Designed and performed all release engineering tasks, including configuration management, versioning, building, staging, and promotion of software components.
• Developed tools, utilities, and applications in Ruby, Groovy, and Java.

January 2005 – November 2006

As part of Fidelity's outbound document services division, I was the lead engineer and system architect for the enterpriseAccess application, which provides facilities and services for creating individualized mailers and brochures to Fidelity's customers. Specific responsibilities included:

• Led a mixed local and offshore team in the reimplementation and modernization of a crucial web application using Java, Struts, Hibernate, and Spring.
• Owned all aspects of application lifecycle, including design, development, release, and installation.
• Implemented build and test automation with Ant, and continuous integration with CruiseControl
• Served on expert working group focusing on application security.