Photo of Casey West
Casey West

218 Dell Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15216 USA
Mobile Phone: +1.724.681.2000

Professional Summary

Lead developer specializing in high-availability, free software systems. I'm an expert on LAMP-style web applications with a decade of hands-on, customer-facing experience.

Employment History

Independent Software Consultant

March 2009 - Present

Projects:

  • Solpath Assumed maintainence 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.
  • The Energy Foundation Built hGrant feed for display, filtering, and syndication in PHP using Symfony. 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 with heavy use of Photoshop, CSS, jQuery, XHTML, and modern web design techniques.
  • 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

CombineNet February 2008 - March 2009

Projects:

  • Infrastructure Upgrade (Code Name "Loveboat") Served as developer and project manager for sweeping upgrades to the flagship product and dependent products. Coordinated the migration of the product across three technical teams and several hundred thousand lines of code. Communicated constantly with IS, QA, Product Management, and two Engineering teams to ensure timely delivery and lightning fast response times during testing and deployment.
  • Unit Testing Framework Using autoconf, automake, and Perl testing libraries, a unit testing framework was grafted onto an eight-year-old, actively developed, organically grown application. Unit test coverage was expanded from 0% to 10% in just a few months.

Achievements

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

Lead Developer & VP Engineering

Socialtext August 2005 - February 2008

Projects:

  • R&D, New Products Initiated early prototypes and concepts for people oriented collaboration tools. Worked closely with CEO and CTO on design and requirements.
  • Lead Developer, UI Team Planned and executed architecture changes to decouple the UI from the application for more agile development and easier customization; led a team of four. Led effort to clean up UI including HTML, CSS, and assets. Contributed to first in-product release of Wikiwyg, the first wysiwyg editor that converts rich text into wikitext for storage.
  • Interim VP Engineering Selected by developers to join executive team as VP Engineering. Split time between active development, team management, and defining company strategy. Worked closely with every department to ensure engineering was positioned for success.

Achievements

  • Wikiwyg released on time, by Web 2.0 Conference, 2005.
  • Collaborated on OSI Compliant Software Licence for SaaS, CPAL.
  • Completed redesign of software which aided in funding.
  • Hired five senior software developers; managed twelve.

Software Developer

pair Networks July 2003 - July 2005

Senior Systems Developer

DynDNS.org August 2002 - July 2003

Senior Software Engineer

Aaronsen Group August 2001 - August 2002

Software Engineer

Agnew Moyer Smith Inc February 2000 - August 2001

Community Involvement

Community Achievements

Speaking Engagements & Publications

Software Development Experience Word Soup

Languages

  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Perl
  • Haskell
  • C
  • PHP

Operating Systems

  • FreeBSD
  • Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu)
  • Mac OS X
  • Windows

Software & Libraries

  • jQuery
  • nginx/Apache 2
  • MySQL/PostgreSQL
  • memcached
  • Django
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Catalyst

Standards

  • Email Protocols
  • I18N
  • L10N
  • HTTP (REST)
  • CSS
  • LDAP

Process

  • Architecture and Design
  • Team Leadership
  • Agile Development
  • Build Systems
  • Scalability
  • Plugins and Extensibility

Web Tools

  • XHTML
  • XML
  • CSS
  • XPath
  • XSL