Old Chestnut Software

Seeds of software wisdom

Resume and Past Work Experience

Joel Meador <joel@oldchestnut.work>

Education and Certificates

  • 2022 - Permaculture Design Certificate - Oregon State University
  • 2003 - BS Computer Science - Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Current Job Role

Staff Engineer - Overseeing multiple projects to ensure long-term success and stability, choosing technology and methodology, mentoring, defining requirements with customers, setting architectural direction, team software review, and individual contribution

Past Job Roles

  • Engineering Manager - Managing team member growth, de-escalation, staffing management, software review, training plan development
  • Senior Software Engineer - mentoring juniors, primarily individual contributor to projects, customer support, mentoring
  • HR Manager - insurance management, job satisfaction and retention, hiring, event planning
  • Technical Customer Support - front line support, article and tutorial writing, bugfixes, workarounds, etc.
  • Software Developer - fullstack development, devops, dx and ux management, team lead as needed

Familiar Technologies

This is not a complete list of things I’ve worked with, but rather things I’ve worked with that were interesting or with which I’ve had recent good experiences.

  • Ruby (on Rails) - high familiarity, 15y daily ruby use in Rails and non-Rails contexts
  • Erlang/Elixir/Phoenix - high familiarity, 3y Elixir/Phoenix daily professional use, and writing toy projects in erlang ecosystem going back about 15y
  • JavaScript - high familiarity, have been writing JS for 20y
  • MySQL - high familiarity, used for 15y on dedicated hardware and as a service (AWS)
  • PostgreSQL - high familiarity, used for 10y, as a service and self-hosted (AWS, Azure)
  • MongoDB - familiar but rusty with operational side, acquainted with database side, used for around 7y
  • Redis - high familiarity but rusty, used for roughly 12y on dedicated hardware and as a service (AWS)
  • Memcached - familiar, used for roughly 8y on dedicated hardware and as a service (AWS)
  • C# - familiar with language and IL, lower familiarity with frameworks, used ASP.NET professionally for a few years and used for writing game mods
  • Bash - familiar, scripting using this often ends up being necessary in ops, been using bash since ~2000
  • Ansible - familiar, used irregularly for around 3y for dedicated host server setup
  • React - acquainted and have done much more code review of it than writing, approximately 7y
  • Terraform - acquainted but rusty, used extensively in the past for operational automation in AWS and DigitalOcean
  • Flutter - familiar but rusty, used irregularly for around 2y for iOS and Android app development

Work Experiences

Project Highlights

ASQ Online Used in many school systems in the United States to assess childhood development. ASQ as a technical and social project has a number of interesting things about it. It was fun to work on because the code base is approximately 15yo and has gone through several major versions of questionnaires, complex multienant needs, supports multiple languages (including Arabic - retrofitting for RTL languages was fun), and has big data and big project problems that require constant maintenance and planning.

AEPSi 3 Used in many school systems in the United States to assess childhood development. “Big Rewrite” greenfield project that was built out using Phoenix on Elixir w/ LiveViews. The most interesting aspects of this project for me were managing the technical outputs. I was Staff Engineer and quasi-program manager on this for about a year keeping schedules in check, interviewing clients about features, ensuring delivery of said features, etc. There’s a good deal of interesting tech in there, as well, but the interesing part to me was keeping the team working together through a very busy year.

DocRaptor A document conversion platform producing millions of documents a month from a variety of lines of business and of extremely variable size and complexity. I worked on the project in many capacities over the years and primarily focused on infrastructure management the last few years I worked on it. My favorite aspect of the work was generally technical support and customer success implementations.

Instrumental An application monitoring platform that processed billions of events per hour. I worked on this mostly from the client agents side, but did significant work on the ingest side (scala->kinesis->mongo) as well as the user management system. I worked on other parts of it, too, but those were my favorite parts.

Project Listing

Not a complete telling of everything I’ve worked on professionally, but it represents a lot of it at a very low level of detail.

YearCompanyProject DescriptionResponsibilities
2001-2003Elastic ImageDesktop computer vision to 3-d printingdeveloper
2003-2005GovBenefits.gov (now benefits.gov)validation and verificationautomation testing
2005Dept. Of LaborLegacy portal softwaremaintenance and new feature development
2005-2007Commscope: SystimaxHardware and software patch cable managementtest consultant
2007-2009Bank of IndianapolisWeb proxy search engine for mainframescreation, maintenance
2007-2009Security Luebke RoofingRoofing estimates portalperformance improvements, maintenance
2007-2009National Precast Concreate AssociationWork estimate portaldevelopment, maintenance
2007-2009OneConnectBusiness-focused social networking siteproject management, development, maintenance
2010-2011Citizen EffectCrowd-sourced charitable project managementdevelopment, maintenance, devops
2010-2011Major computer manufacturerInternal and external use sites for user training, scheduling, and manufacturingcreation, maintenance, devops, design
2010-2011DoppelpagerA/B website testing for non-programmerscreation, maintenance
2010-2011Pocket TalesChildren’s literacy portalcreation, devops, design management
2010-2012Mainstreet CapitalProject Burndown (below) enterprise installationmaintenance, devops, sales
2011-2012Big Blue WagonBusiness-focused video hostingcreation, maintenance, devops
2012-2013RecoveratorStartup weekend winner for home insurance inventory mgmtcreation
2012-2013Major mobile game seriesGame platform backendnew game support, devops, application performance improvement
2012-2013CodifferousGit-based team code review toolcreation, maintenance, marketing
2009-2014Project BurndownProject management scheduling tool for small teamscreation, design, marketing, sales, devops
2011-2014Yipes! OnlineCheerleading e-retailercreation, mainteance, support, devops
2012-2014Social ImprintsBranded printing with social justice focusmaintenance, devops, new feature development
2012-2014Pirate MetricsAARRR tool for small businesscreation, maintenance, marketing
2014-2015Salesforce: Predictive Intelligencee-Commerce recommendation softwaremaintenance, monitoring, team training, feature development
2014-2016LessonlyLearning platform for teamsmonitoring improvements, feature development, scalability consulting
2016OurHealthConsumer-empowered healthcareadvisor on monitoring, team, and software choice
2013-2017GaugesWeb analytics tool focused on real-time updatesmaintenance, devops, marketing, sales
2009-2020Expected BehaviorSmall business focused on product as a service and consulting servicespartner, product development, project management, sales, hr manager, hiring manager, lead generation, marketing, etm.
2010-2020DocRaptorPDF generation from HTMLcreation, maintenance, devops, feature development, technical support, sales
2013-2020InstrumentalAPM focused on code-based metricsmaintenance, devops, feature development, technical support, sales
2020-2021eMedCovid Testing Portalproject management, feature development
2021-2022TribeWorksBenefits portal for creativesproject management, feature development
2022Comoto HoldingsMotorsports e-Commercefeature development, team training
2020-2023FolioSchool Management Portalmaintenance, devops, feature development
2021-2025TILLSChild development assessmentmaintenance, devops, feature development
2021-2025AECFConference Management Portalmaintenance, devops, feature development
2020-2025ASQ OnlineChild development assessmentproduct and project management, technical direction, maintenance, devops, feature development, technical support, team training
2023-2025AEPSi 3Child development assessmentproduct and project management, technical direction, maintenance, devops, feature development, technical support, team training
2024Ocean Conservancy - Debris Removal Animal Impact CalculatorTool to calculate impact on ocean animals from removal of trashtechnical review, development, guidance
2024-2025Indoor Climate Research & Training - Indoor Air QualityPilot research for real-time monitoring of indoor contaminantstechnical leadership, requirements gathering and refinement, development, devops

References Available Upon Request