Jon Raphaelson

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Jon Raphaelson

http://jonraphaelson.name
jonraphaelson@gmail.com
(303) 746-6897

About Me

Experienced, energetic, and enthusiastic software engineer seeking a full-time or contract position working with a team to design and develop web and back-end software solutions. I am eager to apply my talents and creativity to new and difficult problems and to immerse myself in unfamiliar technologies and domains.

Qualifications

An experienced, savvy object-oriented software developer, having been noted for the quality of my code, the speed with which I write it, and the depth and insight of my solutions and architectural analysis.
An extremely fast learner, quickly picking up and becoming proficient with new technologies and frameworks when presented with them.
A creative and capable front-end web developer, both from a technical level (XHTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.) and from a user experience standpoint (design principles, progressive enhancement, markup optimization, etc.)
A forward thinking engineer, passionately interested in new ideas, new ways of accomplishing things, and leveraging new insight into existing methods and practices.

Skills

Solutions architecture, adeptly utilizing both my experience as a dedicated software engineer and as a web-focussed developer to make informed, long-term recommendations on technology solutions.
Back-end development, using a variety of languages, including Python, Ruby, C#, Java, C and SQL, as well as a number of different application frameworks, including Django, Rails, ASP.NET with C#, JSF and JSP/Servlets
Front-end, client-facing development, including coding standards-compliant XHTML, CSS and Javascript as well as desktop development using WinForms on Windows and Cocoa on Mac OS X and iPhone.
Unix and Windows server maintenance and configuration, including configuring web and database server clusters, application deployment strategies and development environment setup.
Dynamic leadership, with an emphasis on learning teammates's skill sets and helping to combine those unique skills into positive outcomes.

Testimonials

Jon is in the top 10% of 'high-powered' engineers I've encountered in my career. In particular, with regard to technical expertise, ability to be very productive in an object-oriented software environment, self-starting capability, and critical thinking and discussions, Jon is a very notable asset to a software development team. Mitch Black, Software Engineer, Sun Microsystems

Jon is an extremely intelligent software developer with an ever-expanding skill set. He is known to be able to learn new programming languages and related technologies for application and web development in days or even hours. Quality products in a timely manner are a must to Jon as he is always willing to put the extra time and effort in to get the job done. Phil DeOrio, Software Developer, Siteworx

During our recent website overhaul, Jon was the technical lead who pushed our project through extremely tight deadlines and quite demanding requirements. Despite these hurdles, he never once lost his sense of humor and completed the project with really well thought out code. His skills are still apparent to me as I have taken over his code to extend and maintain. I have delved pretty deeply into his code and have yet to be let down by anything that seems sub par. I would recommend him to anyone as a great programmer, team lead and client liaison. Ralph Burrows, Managing Director of Web Development, America's Promise

Experience

Siteworx, Inc

Rochester, New York

Senior Software Developer

August 2008 — December 2009

Senior engineer and technical lead on a fluid team of engineers and designers, doing web development work, mainly in C# (ASP.NET) and Python (Django). I was personally responsible for team schedules, task assignments, and as a final gatekeeper on code, as well as general development and architecture. My expertise became the Sitecore CMS, and I engineered solutions for three separate clients in that system. My code responsibilities took place mainly on the back-end, doing domain modelling, search interfacing, and systems integration, though I handled a large portion of front-end development as well.

Selected Projects

Glimpse.org (http://glimpse.org/), a social network for students abroad, sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Written in Python with Django, and including a bespoke editorial submission system and Facebook integration.
Americas Promise (http://americaspromise.org/), a non-profit headed by Gen. Colin and Alma Powell. Developed in the Sitecore CMS under ASP.NET and C#, technical challenges included a multi-tiered membership system, a searchable resource library, PayPal donation integration, and a Lucene-based search system. This project also included several back-end integrations with America's Promise's various IT systems (Dynamics CRM, etc.)
The Heritage Foundation (http://heritage.org/) (relaunch not yet publicly available). Again developed in the Sitecore CMS, the grand majority of technical challenge came from search requirements, which were met with a Sitecore-integrated Solr search system, including multiple search facets and automatic indexing on publish. Also for this project, I developed a system for automatic indexing and linking of fixed taxonomy terms in the body text of articles, to allow automatic categorization and cross-article linking.

Highlights

Designed and implemented an Apache Solr connector for the Sitecore CMS, enabling automatic full text indexing of articles and metadata, including sponsored results and "most popular" metrics, and an associated model-level API for queries and query caching.
Successfully delivered several client projects using technologies I was originally unfamiliar with, including Django, C#, .NET and ASP.NET and the Sitecore CMS, with mainly self-directed training.
Introduced and implemented continuous integration and automated deployments into our build system and process, successfully reducing time to deploy to less than 5 minutes for various Sitecore implementations.
Developed an iPhone application as an in-house marketing tool, sent to potential contracts as a Christmas present in 2008. Siteworx Holiday Crystal Ball

Sun Microsystems

Broomfield, Colorado

Staff Software Developer

March 2008 — July 2008

Software Developer

June 2006 — March 2008

Core member of a medium sized development team, working on ACSLS, a widely-installed, multi-process, IPC-oriented automated tape library management system, doing feature development and bug fixes. I was responsible for two major subsystems, providing both feature development and bug fixes for legacy code, as well as documentation and consulting with my team and engineers on other products dealing with the same hardware interfaces.

Highlights

Designed and implemented the core framework used by the a product, including a multi-threaded, networked Java-to-legacy C IPC subsystem, and an operations management subsystem. A patent was filed which includes specifics about the IPC mechanism.
Interface design and development for a JSF-based administration interface.
Acted as the team's build manager, SCM manager, managed our continuous integration process, and sprint release process.
Co-managed our lab machine rebuild, bootstrapped our wiki and bug-tracker, and wrote various tools for the project, including a command line front-end (including readline style completion and inline editing) to our development library.

notewise.com

Boulder, Colorado

Co-Founder, Engineer

November 2005 — March 2006

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

Boulder, Colorado

Contractor, Simulation & Testing Group

August 2005 — December 2005

Intern, Simulation & Testing Group

June 2005 — August 2005

Education

University of Colorado at Boulder

Boulder, Colorado

B.S. Computer Science

May 2006

Fosdick Award Nominee and "Best Senior Project" Award Winner, 2006 Engineering Design Expo