Things I've done

University News and Events

The challenge: A system for writers to create, collaborate, post and distribute content to media outlets across the country.

I had to find a way for multiple writers to create, submit for peer review and publish articles with media (image, audio and video) to all appropriate platforms (social media, web, email, etc) as well as distribute to media outlets by name or zip code coverage area, all through an intuitive interface able that allowed non-technical writers to quickly and intuitively accomplish these tasks.

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Custom Global News

How can extremely high-end hotels separate themselves from the competition?

These hotels and resorts thrive on special treatment for their guests. I worked with an entrepreneur to deliver a system that took a daily guest data set containing guest home location, language and past resort activities. Each night the system calculated and distributed to writers worldwide the assignments needed to create a two-sided 12"x18" high quality newsletter containing local news, news highlights from the guests home, activities matched to their prior ones and local weather all in their preferred language. After the writers entered their stories, the system compiled them into pdfs that were sent to the hotel, printed and stuffed under the guests' doors before 6 a.m.

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Emergency Response System

The challenge: A system capable of handling a variety of possible emergencies on a university campus.

From simple University closures (e.g. a snow day) that needed to post a message and updates across the entire ranges of university websites as well as send text messages to students and opted in family members. In the event of a more severe emergency, the University's in-house server would be brought offline, opting for a basic pages hosted on an AWS platform. Both message and update posting as well as transitioning to a AWS was capable through a simple, secure user interface accessible to the University Marketing and Communications department as well as Public Safety.

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International Contemporary Ensemble

The members of ICE were musicians bonded together to meet the requests of performances around the world. The challenges...

Who is going to composer and what pieces does he want played? That will tell you the instruments needed and allow you to select the musicians. What kind of special transportation needs are there for those musicians... and their instruments? I worked with ICE to create an application to manage these and many more coordinating and planning challenges.

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University Bulletin Course Catalog

The challenge: Get rid of the book!

It was time for a system to manage all versions of programs and courses and offer users information on program requirements, courses, upcoming offerings and the ability to save multiple schedules as they plan their semesters. This required integrating with multiple university systems, as well as deeply with the university's 190+ site Drupal system ∑which displayed subsets of data across appropriate department, major and recruiting sites.

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Transition from Drupal 7... To Drupal 8

If you know anything about Drupal, you understand the challenge here.

While the goal of this migration was more than just an exact transfer of sites/pages to Drupal 8, the initial step was a script to create the sites, determine the currently used pages and elements and setup Drupal 8 to begin the look & feel changes. For each site the database and tables were created, configuring Apache and Drupal configuration file were made, creating a node (page) and mapping node ids and aliases to keep navigation intact were done. The next step involved rewriting dozens of external applications as Drupal modules while the remainder of the team updated content and integrated new content taking advantage of Drupal 8 types and cards. In all, the final product involved around 180 sites and 30,000 pages.

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SalesForce, Stackla, Localist and NMU APIs

The Challenge: Simplify the interaction with various external products?

As part of the common code library, I was responsible for simplifying and enhancing API sets to allow developers to more easily move data in and out of both homegrown and vendor-provided products and of course to display content throughout the university websites.

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Form Processing Tool

The challenge: How to manage hundreds of forms university wide without burying technical staff.

The solution allowed low-tech personnel to easily layout one or more pages of fields without the need to deal with how they were processed upon submission. The system would validate and capture the information storing it in a reliable enterprise database. A secure interface allowed non-technical form owners to view, edit, print or export their captured data.

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DevOps!

The challenge: Simplify the development environment setup so that developers can focus on value added tasks instead of configuration issues and code version problems.

I was responsible for creating and managing an application that allowed developers to select a server and application, then spin up a virtual machine complete with the exact configuration of the server, all database content was synced, code was checked out of Git and a local address for them to work off.

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Drupal 7 multisite installation

How do you take over 160 sites with tens of thousands of HTML pages and move them into a multisite configuration of Drupal in 9 months?

With a giant script of course! This was one of those unusual occasions when a developer saying "I need a fast computer and to be left alone" actually made sense and the kind of logic and coding was right up my alley. In the end the original content was pealed apart and stuffed in the appropriate tables and configuration files to create all the sites for a succesful, ontime completion.

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Deans and Graduates

The challenge: How best can we market the success of our students?

I was in charge of buidling a system to pull a list of deans and graduates each semester, determining what national and local media outlets covered their home zip codes, them building a nicely formated email that then got emailed or faxed to the relevant outlets.

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Common Code Library

The challenge lies in the fact that a mistake here would break... well, everything

No one wants to rebuild error handling, database transaction classes or API integration, etc for each project. Dozens of applications across the university rely on these classes. So they called on me to build and manage this code.

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Epotec

Epotec harnessed the resources of the Internet to enhance the effectiveness of behavioral health services. Epotec combined ingenuity and technology in Web-based interactive programs that help people lead happier, more productive lives by building skills and solving problems securely and privately.

More than 40 clients made our programs available to more than 700 companies and about 30 million people.

I was brought in as Epotec's seventh employee to architect and manage the delivery of their primary product by an outsourced team. As the product reached completion, I was responsible for bringing technology in-house. As vice president of technology, my responsibilities included putting together a 50-person development team, budgeting, managing venture capital partner expectations, but most importantly, understanding the needs of our broadening industry impact and ensuring our products were on target.

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Online certification tracking system (Dearborn Financial Services)

How do large companies manage employees who have specialized certifications requirements and what happens to the company if the certifications expire?

For starters, if companies have employees with expired certifications, such as Series-7 financial certifications, they are heavily fined. Dearborn Financial Services saw an opportunity and hired me to lead of team of six to build a system that track the neccesary certification requirements for each employee, notifying them when training was required and provided a link to the necessary materials. In the event an employee became at risk of falling out of compliance, the system would notify managers in a timely manner.

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Brinson Partners Presentation Management System

In the world of Brinson Partners, making a presentation to a client that contains misinformation is a potential financial disaster.

In order to mitigate this, all slides were created in the central office and no other content is allowed. In the past, the partner had to fly to the Chicago office to put their presentation together, which was then printed, bound and shipped to the location the presentation would take place. Don't feel too bad for them, these partners all had their own jets! I was hired to build an application that allowed partners to view real-time images of the slides and organize them into the "story" the partner wanted to tell. When they were done, a presentation was created for them to download and print remotely, but not edit. In addition, stories could be saved and when opened later, for another client perhaps, the system would inform the partner if any of the original slides had been updated.

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Allstate Online Insurance Marketplace

Allstate determined from years of experience that buyers of term life insurance rarely by from the first vender they talk to.

Drew led a team of 6 in building an online marketplace that allowed users to research term life on a generic site, fill out an application and receive quotes from an array of companies, each of which was able to upload and manage their own application and pricing criteria.

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Bell Atlantic

Have you ever called the east coast? Did it go through? Good, then the system I and 250 fellow "Androids" worked on to monitor the line status of all Bell Atlantic lines is working well!

American Greeting Cards

Have you ever received a shipment from American Greeting cards? Did it fit in the box? Excellent! The project I worked on to maximize the shipping container space worked. I was part of a 50-person team of Accenture (Andersen Consulting) personnel.