Hello,
my name is Aaron Loes and this is my resume
About Me
Application architect and engineer with 15+ years of experience working on large and small applications serving the needs of internal and external customers. Requirements gathering, application design, development, testing and deployment are every day tasks.
My interests are vast but they mostly are encompassed around the designing and building of enterprise scale web applications using mostly industry standard tools but including some cutting edge technologies. I believe in having a practical foundation prior to breaching the event horizon of the latest-and-greatest technologies.
What am I Learning Now?
Building highly functional web applications with Micronaut, AWS Serverless and VueJS.
Experience & Education
-
2020
NextEra Analytics
Software Contractor
Member of the Smart Grid Analytics team tasked with building out software for monitoring, managing, visualizing and analyzing smart meter data through the use of in-house developed software for use by external customers.
- Tasked with understanding, documenting and explaining the architecture and implementation of existing unmaintained software system for future enhancements.
- Redesigned and refactored existing Micronaut and Python microservices, VueJs user interface, and Terraform infrastructure configuration to convert from single-account single-tenant deployment to add multi-account and multi-tenant capabilities.
- Implemented mock backend and frontend features for demonstration environments for the use in sales conversations with future customers and partners.
- Presented lightning talk about the Smart Grid Analytics project’s purpose and technologies to company wide technology teams.
Member of the Center of Work Excellence team tasked with designing and building software to aid wind turbine technicians through workload optimization and visualization using in-house developed software systems.
- Technical lead for the Total Cost Optimization software system which is responsible for generating an optimized schedule of daily work for field technicians across all renewable energy wind farm sites in the United States based on calculated revenue gained from work performed.
- Designed and implemented multiple software components for data retrieval and aggregation using serverless technologies DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Chalice, etc and infrastructure automation with Terraform.
- Introduced a fully automated software versioning system for software libraries and deployable systems to reduce developer time and effort spent deploying new features to production.
- Refactored and integrated existing heuristic-based work scheduling algorithm into primary field technician tooling using Python, AWS serverless and VueJS.
- Implemented features for technician web and mobile applications using Typescript, Angular, Kotlin and Groovy.
-
2019
FastBridge
Software Contractor
Part of the New Architecture team tasked with designing and implementing the reimagining of FastBridge’s student assessment software aiming for high scalability, high reliability, rapid development and reduced operational costs through use of pay-per-use serverless technologies and TDD and pair programming methodologies.
- Implemented AWS lambda functions in Python through the use of the Serverless Framework
- Integrated the new functionality into the existing Spring based legacy monolith application
- Improved testability of implementations through use of automated end-to-end regression testing through the continuous deployment pipelines
- Worked with company operational teams to get infrastructure in place for production deployments through automated AWS CloudFormation templates
- Cross trained with other teams about the technologies and methodologies used for the next generation vision
-
2015
TransVoyant
Software Contractor & Architect
Company-wide Architect responsible for guiding teams in best practices in software design to meet company defined standards and architecture methodologies. Infrastructure team lead responsible for building out the company-wide infrastructure, deployment tooling, and systems monitoring.
- Built out core frameworks leveraging Spring for all 250+ microservices to use to allow for rapid development while maintaining a high production quality
- Helped transition company over to Docker via Docker Swarm
- Helped transition company software messaging middleware to Kafka
- Helped transition company software to automated deployments to Ansible
- Proved out a prototype for automating entire companies infrastructure build-out using Terraform and custom modules onto AWS
- Designed and built out companies entire platform security using Spring Security and OAuth for microservices and began migrating company to use encryption in transit and at rest and maintained air-gapped private certificate authority for all internal systems - Design entire central monitoring system using the Elastic Stack and integrated abilities into core framework
- Laid out best practices for software design and architecture best practices and participated in software design reviews
- Designed technological roadmap to meet companies future goals
- Lead small team in building out and maintaining company wide infrastructure running on AWS
-
2012
FICO
Lead Software Engineer
Architect responsible for designing and developing reimagined Java enterprise web applications for the customer engagement tools of FICO’s marketing division. Main software security engineer and lead UI engineer for all Roseville based marketing software solutions.
- Re-architected and developed the message processing engine for a customer engagement application to be far more robust and scalable than previously designed using Spring Integration and Spring Batch achieving an increased throughput of operations by 1400% minimum.
- Co-architected and developed a multi-tenant application allowing customers to dynamically design and manage a data model through either an OAuth controlled HAL/HATEOAS based RESTful API or an single page application (SPA) based user interface (UI). This solution used the ports and adapters architecture pattern and was implemented mainly with Spring backed by MongoDb and Couchbase.
- Main software security engineer for all Roseville based marketing software solutions.
- Brought in new tools and procedures for improving the quality of products through the use of industry standard tools and testing practices as well as documentation and information collaboration.
- Built a framework for testing highly dynamic user interfaces using Selenium Webdriver and the PageObject pattern.
- Participated in the development of a reimplementation of a customer surveying and registration application using OSGi, MongoDB, Backbone and Knockout.
- Participated in the development of an analytic based software application using OSGi, MongoDb, and Knockout.
- Lead UI engineer for all Roseville based software solutions using the latest JavaScript based SPA frameworks such as Knockout and Backbone.
- Scrum master for a small team during the development life cycle of one of FICO marketing product solutions.
-
2012
Loesoft
Owner
-
2011
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Masters of Science, Software Engineering
-
2009
Boston Scientific
Sr Software Engineer
Assist in the development and maintenance of a multi-tiered Java enterprise web application that assists medical professionals in the health care of individuals with implanted cardiac devices.
- Participated in the full software development life-cycle to complete a re-visioning of a legacy enterprise application using current age web development technologies such as Spring and Ajax while following Agile methodologies
- Lead a small team of offshore developers in the development of high quality application software
- Completed end-of-project documentation for approval submission to the FDA
- Extended a multinational Java application to support the technical and business needs of Japanese medical professionals
- Lead a small team of offshore testers in the full validation of multi version browser compatibility of a internationally based web application
- Participated in the maintenance of application code, unit tests, and integration tests of international code base using standardized company practices
- Mentor for a summer intern in a project aimed at decreasing application build time through the use of a distributed computing of unit, integration and user acceptance testing
-
2007
American Public Media / Minnesota Public Radio
Software Engineer
Participated in the development of system requirements for packaged and custom systems. Work with customers and other developers to define data and business requirements to enhance company efficiencies. Code, test, implement and maintain software solutions using company developed tools and methodologies.
- Co-lead the complete rewrite of a business essential PHP application to incorporate IT standards of ORM management, MVC patterns, and Ajax based functionality
- Primary developer for the Java, Hibernate and Struts based play-to-air system through the addition of new radio stations and interfaces to external outputs
- Developed and presented written proposals for projects to enhance audience interaction with APM websites and improve access to detailed broadcast information
- Designed and developed a framework for Ajax based access to music content for a public facing application allowing users to browse, rate and request from MPR's TheCurrent music library
- Participated with a team of four to develop the PHP based Minnesota Fantasy Legislature game
- Worked on major updates to allow account registration and management to MPR's online enterprise contribution application using Java, Hibernate and Struts
- Integrated many of our enterprise Java applications with external business systems to enhance functionality and usability through the use of Hibernate
- Designed and developed an internal PHP application to provide web based access to studio recorded audio
- Provided proof of concepts of new functionality for research purposes on new functionality to existing systems using the Grails framework
- Designed and developed a testing framework for automated user acceptance testing using PHPUnit and Selenium -
2005
Accenture Technology Solutions
Senior Programmer
Work with various clients to assist in the testing of Accenture and client developed web based applications. Responsibilities include test development, testing process and tool development, and provide training.
- Reported directly to client management on status of applications completion
- Design, developed and documented an automated Python application to convert DVT scripts to JWebUnit based scripts that supported client tools and company practices
- Provided training of testing application to a large testing team
- Submitted bug reports with detailed description of the issue with instructions on how to duplicate and fix
- Worked on a team to perform functional testing of an Accenture developed applications -
2004
University of Minnesota Duluth
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science