Photo of Casey West
Casey West

URL: http://caseywest.com
URL: http://github.com/cwest
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/in/caseywest

Professional Summary

I specialize in highly available, maintainable, scalable solutions with a focus on developer, community, and user experience.

I empower teams to deliver outstanding results under difficult constraints by building teams with culture and tools that promote happiness and productivity.

Employment History

Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry

PivotalJune 2015 — Present

Technical advocate for Pivotal's open source and commercial products including Cloud Foundry, Concourse CI, PCFDev, and Spring Boot. Community ambassador for the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

International speaker on software engineering, software architecture, devops, platforms, continuous delivery, and modern infrastructure giving hundreds of talks, tutorials, and training sessions per year.

Advisor to global fortune 2000 and United States F500 companies delivering business value with Pivotal's software, tools, and techniques.

UI Architect & DevOps Architect

WhiteHat SecurityNovember 2012 — June2015

Software Architect and team lead responsible for sweeping change and modernization across the organization. Acted as a strong, hands on technical lead and change agent to bring modern development tools and processes into Engineering and affected positive change in IT, development, QA, release, and design. I worked very effectively as a technical leader while remote.

  • Technical Leadership, Change Agent, Team Building, and Hiring

    Built and led three teams: one DevOps and two Application development teams. Hired the best talent available from within the company, across departments, and from around the world. Implemented a successful, modern hiring program which reduced waste and offered high levels of confidence in fit of candidates for culture, experience, and skill set. Hired eight engineers and increased engineering diversity using my process.

    Rebuilt the SDLC from the ground up to allow continuous delivery with a streamlined, agile, lean process and a culture of trust and shared responsibility. Made it successful by implementing 12-factor apps, an automated software delivery pipeline and increased collaboration and transparency with GitHub Enterprise, HipChat, and New Relic.

  • DevOps, Developer Tools, Infrastructure, and Automation

    Lead a team of DevOps engineers, known as Shire Ops. We quickly converted the engineering organization from Subversion to GitHub Enterprise and the open-source pull request collaboration process. While doing so we rebuilt the SDLC and increased our releases per year by 300%. We automated the delivery pipeline with Jenkins, Ansible, and Docker, which opened the opportunity for continuous delivery.

    Built the foundation that let us deploy easily to private data centers, and AWS in Germany opening up Europe as a new market. We were also able to upgrade our operating system by four major revisions across all data centers without downtime or interruption of the development process. Within a year Shire Ops took primary responsibility for the delivery and health of production operations in multiple data centers.

  • Architecture and Software Development

    Lead a team of software engineers, known as Shire Apps. We are rebuilding our customer facing web application from scratch using Ruby on Rails. Avoided second system syndrome and redeveloped components one at a time by embedding new functionality into the existing user interface. This was seamless and allowed us to develop the next generation interface iteratively.

    Drastically improved performance and usability with each component we rebuilt. Created a culture of high quality development while delivering business value; our application was a joy to work on and easy to maintain. We did this through prototyping, BDD, and refactoring.

Independent Software Consultant

Self EmployedMarch 2009 — November 2012
  • Security Remediation and Modernization for Experian CheetahMail Built static security analysis tools to find XSS and SQLi vulnerabilities in large-scale Perl applications with minimal false positives. Worked with a team of engineers on vulnerability remediation. Helped rebuild core implementation using best practices of modular, testable software design.
  • Internal 360 Degree Review Service for Startup Company Created a small team to quickly build and deliver a beautiful, feature rich 360 degree peer review tool which modeled the company's organizational structure and managed the workflow of collecting and responding to peer feedback. Integrated into their internal SSO infrastructure and deployed behind their firewall with no access to the system.
  • Development and Architecture for a Preventitive Health Social Startup Joined a small team of developers building a preventative health social network with gamification of personal health goals. Quickly implemented solutions to challenges created by prior engineers' poorly tested work, and helped them get past critical technical challenges to move forward and go to market.
  • Realtime Geospatial Media Service for Technology Company Joined a small team to architect and build a realtime software product for live streaming video, video on demand, and photo sharing on a closed network for use inside organizations. Application includes geo-locating all media (live streams, video on demand, and photos) as well as agents responsible for generating that media. Operators of the system can view the status of all objects in the system in realtime including locations, streaming, and new generated media. Built application using Ruby on Rails 3, jQuery, CSS 3.0, advanced KML, Google Maps API v3, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), VLC for transcoding, and MySQL Geospatial Extensions. Web user interface optimized for desktop and mobile clients.
  • Social Network Optimization and Visualization for Startup Company Completely overhauled the user experience, rebuilding the workflow, visual design, and focus of the application. Rebuilt all data visualizations using HTML 5, CSS 3.0, and jQuery for iPad compatible charts and graphs, and interactive visualizations. Rebuilt the in-app twitter client. Engineered visualizations and workflows to have real-time update capabilities in most areas of the application, with user control. Consulted the team on direction and focus of features and design, and contributed to project management and goal making.
  • Jobs Graph Social Network for Startup Company Early-project conceptualization and brainstorming, and later working with a development team building functionality by glueing backend work to design concepts. Built with Ruby on Rails 3 with jQuery. Developed integrations with third-party from LinkedIn, Plancast, and SlideShare.
  • Data Cloud Dashboard for Technology Infrastructure Company Developed a theme-able, dashboard interface on top of a RESTful data cloud product developed internally. Used jQuery and modern web techniques.
  • Grants Management Software for a Non-profit Foundation Built hGrant feed for display, filtering, and syndication in PHP using Symfony. Co-architected and developed new Grants Management software to facilitate the grant making workflow in the organization. Developed in Ruby and JavaScript with Ruby on Rails and jQuery. Built interactive, immersive dashboard interface from client mockups making heavy use of CSS 3.0, jQuery, HTML 5, and modern web design techniques.
  • Data Visualization and Aggregation for a Non-profit Assumed maintenance and continued development of Grantsfire. Developed in Perl and JavaScript using Catalyst, jQuery, XSLT, Microformats, OpenID, and MySQL. Improved performance; added data and administrative tools, feed validation services, OpenID integration; and performed sysadmin duties. Wrote the hGrant Microformat Specification based on existing work, implementations, and documentation.
  • Social Network, Scoring System, and iPhone Development for Design and Game Company Assumed maintenance and continued development of XEOPlay, the online social network for the Tilt, an iPad and iPhone game. Worked on performance benchmarks for the game on iOS devices and improved in-game score keeping and leaderboards.
  • Social Network and Online Game for a Civic Organization Developed and deployed the Drive Less Challenge social network and gaming tool for the 2010 challenge. Built with Ruby on Rails, Open ID, Facebook Connect, and modern web design techniques.
  • Volunteer Management System for Wikimedia Foundation Built volunteer submission system to give thousands the opportunity to participate in Wikimedia's strategic planning. Developed in Python and JavaScript using Django and jQuery. The application is internationalized (I18N) and localized (L10N) using Django, with additional custom languages added according to client needs. Performed system administration, including detailed Nagios service monitors. Application integrates with MediaWiki using its web service API.

Lead Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Architecture

CombineNetFebruary 2008 — March 2009

Lead Engineer with focus on infrastructure and web application architectures.

Achievements

  • Managed engineering effort through a comprehensive, 10-month infrastructure upgrade.
  • Advanced unit testing among product engineers.
  • Improved UX through RTE integration and Spreadsheet data validation.

Lead Developer & VP Engineering

SocialtextAugust 2005 — February 2008

Lead developer specializing in web application user interfaces. Interim VP Engineering.

Achievements

  • Stepped up to be interim VP Engineering; lead engineering to meet company strategy.
  • Hired five senior software developers; managed twelve.
  • Completed redesign of software which aided in funding.
  • Lead R&D of new people oriented collaboration tools
  • Collaborated on OSI Compliant Software Licence for SaaS, CPAL.
  • Wikiwyg released on time, by Web 2.0 Conference, 2005.

Software Developer

pair NetworksJuly 2003 — July 2005

Senior Systems Developer

DynDNS.orgAugust 2002 — July 2003

Senior Software Engineer

Aaronsen GroupAugust 2001 — August 2002

Software Engineer

Agnew Moyer Smith IncFebruary 2000 — August 2001

Community Involvement

A short list of some things I know about.

Languages

  • Ruby
  • CoffeeScript/JavaScript
  • Perl
  • Python
  • Haskell
  • C
  • PHP
  • Shell

Services & OSes

  • AWS
  • Heroku
  • New Relic
  • Travis CI
  • GitHub
  • Mac OS X
  • Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora)
  • FreeBSD
  • Windows

Software & Libraries

  • Ruby on Rails 4
  • Backbone/jQuery
  • Ansible/Chef
  • Catalyst
  • nginx/Apache 2
  • PostgreSQL/MySQL
  • Redis/memcached
  • Django
  • Jekyll

Standards

  • HTTP (REST)
  • Realtime Web (WebSockets/PubSub)
  • Email Protocols
  • I18N
  • L10N
  • LDAP

Process

  • Architecture and Design
  • Team Leadership
  • Agile/Lean/MVP Development
  • Responsive/Mobile Applications
  • Build Systems
  • Operational Security
  • Web Security
  • Scalability
  • Plugins and Extensibility

Web Tools

  • HTML 5
  • CSS 3.0/SASS/Less
  • XML
  • XPath
  • XSL
  • KML