Lee Pender
Software developer and product designer with 15 years experience. I like Elixir, Ruby, and Typescript. I practice TDD and XP. I love projects with purpose.
Professional Experience
Thought Driven Development
Role: Founder
Size: 1-5 engineers
Duration: 9 years
A boutique remote software consulting agency, (formerly Lunchtime Labs) specializing in native and web app development. Recent clients include:
Recent Clients
American Express
Role: Technical Advisor
Size of engagement: 1 engineer
Duration: 4 months
Skills: product, process, technical strategy
Acting as technical advisor to senior management in their Global Services division, I performed a series of user interviews to investigate user roles, workflows and tooling across teams. I then identified gaps and inefficiencies in their internal processes, quantified these in terms of risk and costs to the business, and delivered a series of recommendations rooted in agile principles.
2k games
Role: Technical Lead
Size of engagement: 3 engineers
Duration: 1 year
Skills: architecture, agile, compliance product design, rails, typescript, react, terraform, IAC, AWS, OpenAPI OAS, TDD, API design
- I designed the technical architecture in close collaboration with their head of mobile, then led a team of three developers to implement a Rails service for handling GDPR compliance, as well as an interface for interacting with the service in React / Typescript. In the course of the completion of the project, I implemented Terraform scripts for deploying the service to AWS, JWT authentication, a OpenAPI based REST API, and more.
- I architected and implemented a new paradigm for customer-facing wikis in Rails / Contentful, as well as the first instance of a customer-facing wiki under this new paradigm.
University of Chicago
Role: Technical Lead
Size of engagement: 3 engineers, 1 UX designer
Duration: 4 years
Skills: elixir, golang, product design, typescript, react, microservices, concurrent processing, fault-tolerant, geo-spatial analysis
- I worked with faculty and students on a criminal justice reform initiative led by professor Steven Levitt, co-author of the "Freakonomics".
- I supplied a team of three engineers and a UX designer to the University of Chicago where I architected a fault-tolerant, microservices-based concurrent data pipeline in Elixir and Golang, processing real-time geo-spatial analysis at scale, then oversaw the project development.
IBM
Role: Senior Software Engineer
Size of engagement: 1 engineer
Duration: 4+ years
Skills: mysql, data analytics, monitoring, security, caching, performance, react, typescript
- I was initially contacted by IBM to build a series of lead-generation assessments in React.
- I then led a series of initiatives to migrate blog data. Data from dozens of blogs was pulled into a unified blog using custom scripts built in Ruby.
- Later work involved data analysis and manipulation of their tag and category taxonomy using custom SQL scripting.
- I worked with the devops team in the IBM cloud environment to create a fault-tolerant and performant blog deployment, including the development of a custom page caching plugin for WordPress with advanced invalidation rules.
Mack Weldon
Role: Fractional CTO
Size of engagement: 3 engineers
Duration: 1 year
Skills: ecommerce, rails, spree, shopify, vue, javascript, monitoring, security, caching, performance, react, typescript
- Acting as fractional CTO for Mack Weldon, I oversaw technical architecture, monitoring and security for the organization during a period of substantial growth.
- We designed and built their loyalty Shopify app and generated a proposed updated design for their returns app.
- I oversaw the zero-downtime cut over from Rails/Spree to Shopify.
- I solved mission-critical site speed issues, reducing page load time by more than 100% by implementing multi-phase page load with Vue and working with Shopify tech to improve page cache invalidation strategy.
- On my own initiative, I built a system which alerts on late orders saving the company tens or hundreds of thousands in lost revenue.
Consensys
Role: Senior Software Engineer
Size of engagement: 1 engineer
Duration: 1 year
Skills: design, development, product, jekyll, react, typescript
- I worked on the Rhombus project, involving Eth oracles.
- Revamping landing page, I removed jank during page load, improved load times and SEO, implemented features and new designs.
- I created concept and slide deck for a presentation at Eth Denver.
- I designed and built their blog using Jekyll.
Software developer II
SkilledUp Accelerator
Role: Software Developer
Size of team: 10 engineers
Duration: 1 year+
Skills: rails, react, typescript, javascript, sql, heroku
- Working embedded with the team at thoughtbot NYC, developed an educational web platform in Rails and React.
Lead front end developer
HealthGuru.com/Kitara Media
Role: Lead Front End Developer
Size of team: ~10 engineers
Duration: 3 years
Skills: php, javascript, html, css
- As a member of the senior engineering team, I oversaw the front end department during a period of substantial growth, from 20-60 employees, culminating in our acquisition by a publicly held company, Kitara Media.
- Implemented a responsive redesign.
- Led frontend team in the development and implementation of internal tools.