Availability in 2019

UPDATE: I’ve landed on my feet at Artisan Technology Group. Thank you to everyone who reached out with contacts and assistance.

I have greatly enjoyed my time at The Nerdery. Unfortunately, after 4+ years of service, the regional office where I worked was shut down.

For the first time in almost a decade I suddenly find myself out of work. I am immediately available for hire in senior or team lead positions in .NET or Javascript. While much of my career has been in consulting companies, I would also be interested to try working for a product company. In either type of role, one of my main interest is in getting opportunities to guide and mentor newer developers and help them level up their skills and careers.

If you are looking to fill roles similar to this, please get in contact with me at hello@mattburkedev.com. Further contact information can be found on my CV. See also my LinkedIn profile for additional detail and recommendations from my previous coworkers.

Portfolio

Working at the Nerdery has been one of the best experiences of my career. I got to work on a diverse set of problems for multiple clients in many different industries.

Here are some of the highlights:

  • In my first engagement, I worked directly with Tastefully Simple on their Sitecore installation that we had recently completed prior to my employment. Though I started as the sole maintenance programmer, I quickly became a trusted technical advisor, helping them choose technical approaches to building out new features to meet their changing business goals.
  • After a year on that project, I got an opportunity to work with some of my local teammates on a new project for a local insurance company. At first we worked on some data processing and ETL flows for a data warehouse, but soon also became involved in building out the web presence for a new venture. I led a team of Nerdery and client developers in standing up a Kentico solution. I worked directly with the business analysts and product owner to choose and prioritize features. I also assisted on a node.js based admin portal.
  • One of my favorite small projects was a tool for the quality assurance team at a glass manufacturer. By loading images of the glass, the WPF software I wrote could process the image to make trouble spots pop with color for easy identification. The user could then hover their mouse over the spot and see the exact coordinates in the pane of glass for repair. I enjoyed this project because desktop programming was a fun departure from web applications and I had to read up on image processing algorithms.
  • Another client I greatly enjoyed working with was providing support for their suite of online industry magazines. They had about 8 different sites running out of a single Sitecore instance. I helped with feature development and bug fixes. My favorite success was identifying and resolving some performance regressions with the Solr search service and database connection leaks. Fixing this issues improved throughput on troublesome pages by a factor of 10!
  • After this project, I worked on set of portals for a regional pharmacy. While another developer created an API layer, I built out two portals in ASP.NET MVC: the one for the end users to check on prescription statuses, and one for the pharmacy technicians. I did all the software architecture for these two portals and implemented a large suite of tests for every layer.
  • More recently, myself and two of my fellow .NET developers did some interesting work for a local bank. We cleverly injected a facade layer into a legacy application so that we could transparently swap out its previous mainframe data access routines with ones that consumed an API service layer built by another internal team. This was a highly collaborative project where I helped road-map and identify needs for the API team. I even got to read some COBOL! I feel like my greatest success on this project was building some infrastructure and tooling that greatly accelerated the speed at which my fellow developers could deliver working code.
  • Finally, I recently joined a long running project as a front end engineer writing React code. My complementary skills in server-side development let me work on features in a full-stack capacity. I really enjoyed this because I did not have to wait for another developer to build features in the other end of the stack.

Writing and Speaking

I learned an enormous amount while I was at the Nerdery. One of my passions is sharing my experience and knowledge with fellow developers. Many of the articles on this website came about directly from things I learned doing work for my customers. A few of my favorite and most popular articles are listed below:

In addition to those written articles, I have also twice shared my experience with the local development community through Centriq Training’s continuing education program. I gave the following talks to the graduates of their application developer program.

Management

Near the end of my time there, I became the team manager for the .NET developers in Kansas City. I assisted with finding them projects, I completed and delivered performance reviews, and did biweekly one-on-ones. Managing this team was a pleasure. They are all excellent developers: extremely sharp technically, but also having a refined ability to speak confidently to clients. I oversaw two Software Engineers, two Senior Software Engineers, and one fellow Principal Software Engineer. I can recommend any of them whole-heartedly. Let me know if you are looking and I can put them in touch with you.