Resume/CV for Ben Swayne

Profile

I am an experienced Product Owner/Software Architect with a passion for excellence. As a senior software developer and team lead, I am experienced with the development of new feature specifications and writing out notes or instructions for team members that are detailed enough to get good quality predictable results without micromanaging good talent on the team.

With over 13 years software development experience and a degree in business management, I am a very unique breed of middle manager who bridges the gap between non-technical stakeholders (such as upper management or customers) and the talent pool of developers who would rather just focus on code. My excellent verbal and written communication skills are a true compliment to my deep understanding of technical systems.

I am detail oriented and enjoy performance tuning and optimization of both software/web sites and business processes. I feel good when my team’s work has improved the efficiency or performance of a software or system delivering real business value. I also love the feeling of “winning” when my work stands above the status quo by ranking higher in search engine results, increasing conversion rates or decreasing bounce rates. When I need a break from the task at hand, I browse analytics data and reports to glean new insights and appreciate the progress we’ve developed so far.

Work Experience

Cloud Software Architect, Teradici

April 2019 – Present (2 years)
Burnaby, BC, Canada

nodejs golang docker kubernetes azure aws gcp xml json jwt

I joined Teradici to help drive our industry leading VDI cloud architecture forward. Teradici began in 2004/2005 as a hardware focused company. As the industry shifts towards commodity hardware and elastic cloud services we are shifting our focus towards cloud native software defined products.

Moving from monolithic and stateful solution components to distributed microservices. Moving from every piece of software we make being stateful to making front end services stateless and scalable with serverless cloud architectures.

The future of VDI is highly scalable, highly fault tolerant and easily configurable/deployable all while maintaining system security.

SENIOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPER III/TEAM LEAD, Save-On-Foods

April 2018 – April 2019 (1 year)
Langley, BC, Canada

graphql java saml openam oracle jboss

My role as a team lead within the IT business applications department is to oversee a small project focused team of 3-5 developers to complete several transformational IT upgrades over the next few years. Our environment is primarily JaveEE/Oracle focused for enterprise system integration with a sprinkling of JavaScript and C#. We are heavily invested in the Atlassian suite of software for managing our projects including the infamous JIRA.

To keep up with industry trends, a number of aggressive initiatives are in place to continuously improve the Save-On-Foods eCommerce platform as well as surrounding IT systems that manage customer accounts and loyalty (“More Rewards” points program).

The primary focus of the past year has been to centralize ownership and control of Save-On-Foods customer accounts while integrating with several 3rd party software applications for ecommerce and online coupons. Our core SSO solution is built around OpenAM which provides base implementations for SAML and OAuth to facilitate federation with 3rd party applications. Our custom identity repository service is written with JavaEE 8 exposing a powerful GraphQL API for our internal systems to interact with.

SENIOR SOFTWARE ARCHITECT/TEAM LEAD, StoreBuilder eCommerce

May 2013 – April 2018 (4 years 11 months)
Surrey, BC, Canada

c# sql server entityframework handlebars javascript stylesheets rest json jwt

As the senior architect of the StoreBuilder eCommerce platform, I played a critical role in the design and development of our suite of competitive features. I managed our team of three and then four full time developers in an agile development environment. What started as an informal agile approach 4 years ago has matured into a more formal SCRUM approach using JIRA to manage our backlog and sprints.

Examples of some of the features I am proud of architecting would be the StoreBuilder Data Warehouse and StoreBuilder Theme Engine. Our data warehouse is based on the popular star schema with a few enhancements to provide additional sorting capabilities without increasing physical data storage or affecting query performance. Our Theme Engine feature was architected by myself and then wholly implemented by my team using the specifications I wrote and is an excellent portfolio piece of good software design.

Frozen Mountain Software was the parent organization for StoreBuilder eCommerce until they sold it to new owners in April 2017.

SENIOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPER, Frozen Mountain Software

May 2011 – April 2017 (6 years)
Surrey, BC, Canada

My role was initially to maintain and develop new features for Frozen Mountain’s flagship product WebSync. WebSync is an implementation of the Bayeux protocol (aka “Comet”) for the Microsoft technology stack (Windows, SQL Server, IIS, ASP.net). WebSync provides real-time pub-sub data messaging across a wide variety of platforms and devices. I worked on optimizations for high scalability with client counts into the 100,000’s (prior to the common availability/support of web sockets, at which time long-polling was the norm). While I was hired for my experience with C#/JavaScript/MS SQL, I also helped with their initial Java client implementation as well as some contracting with PHP integration. I also assisted in company attendance at industry tradeshows such as the Xamarin Developers Conference where we showcased our Xamarin product SDKs.

OWNER/SOFTWARE DEVELOPER, Lynx System Integrators

Dec 2008 to September 2012 (3 years 10 months)
Surrey, BC, Canada

This was my own business that I started while earning a degree in business management. I sold barcode and RFID related equipment online as well as providing ecommerce website development services. I also designed and built an inventory and labour tracking system for industrial equipment manufacturing and servicing (which I am proud to say remains in reliable production use to this day) using barcode and RFID scanning devices. Our manufacturing inventory and time tracking software was built with C#/MS SQL and included a proprietary server application which allowed low power embedded devices to reliably conduct transactional database operations over unreliable networks (such a wifi in a machine shop with a dozen welding machines in operation).

INTERNAL APPLICATIONS DEVELOPER, Advanced Nutrients

October 2010 – May 2011 (8 months)
Abbotsford, BC, Canada

My primary role at Advanced Nutrients was to develop an internal CRM application to replace the expensive SalesForce.com subscription service. With the size of their sales team, the cost of the subscription CRM service was beginning to look like a developer’s salary and didn’t provide many significant benefits other than convenience of access. By developing our own in-house solution it greatly simplified our ability to write new business reports, perform better analysis and integrate with a variety of other systems such as Sage MAS500 accounting software. My solution was based on an application framework from Developer’s Express called XAF. XAF in turn was built on an ORM data layer/model called XPO. These technologies allowed rapid development of a full featured CRM application in about 3-6 months (of course there were other daily responsibilities that prevented 100% attention to this project).

SENIOR SOLUTIONS DEVELOPER, CipherLab

March 2007 to May 2010 (3 years 3 months)
Plano, TX, USA (remote contractor)

Developed custom mobile device and desktop software using C/C++ for CipherLab embedded data collection devices including windows and non-windows mobile devices and barcode scanners. Provided reseller application development support for the CipherLab windows device SDK. Regularly attended and presented products at both Canadian and American industry tradeshows. This telecommuting position required exceptional team work and communication skills.

Expertise

Amazon Web Services (AWS): EC2, Route 53, ELB, CloudFront, S3
Java, C#/Asp.net, MVC, MS SQL Server/TSQL, EntityFramework, RESTful web services, GraphQL, Data Warehousing, Windows Server/IIS, SSO/OAuth/SAML, JavaScript, Handlebars, CSS, .less, HTML, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery, Umbraco (CMS)
Tools: Microsoft Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Sql Server Management Studio, JIRA, Zendesk, Harvest, Xero, Mercurial, Git, SVN, Bamboo, SonarCube, Team City
Hardware: Barcode, RFID and other AIDC and POS equipment. I enjoy embedded development too!
Business: Project Management, Strategic Planning, Trade Show Presentations, Peer Mentoring
Other Areas: C, C++, XML/XSLT, OPOS.net

Education

BACHELOR’S OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, Langara College

2004 – 2011 (7 years – completed while working full time throughout)
Vancouver, BC, Canada

I graduated from the Business Management Diploma Program with Distinction (GPA > 3.67) in 2007. I later graduated with a Bachelors of Business Administration (BBA) degree with Computer Science and Philosophy electives also with Distinction in 2011.