Nowell Strite

410 Sunrise Dr, Huntington, VT 05462 ● nowell@strite.org ● (703) 740-7552

Key Qualifications/Philosphy

  • Embrace open source technology and the collaborative and iterative development approach that it inspires
  • Employ an Agile based software development approach with a healthy recognition that interpretation is always necessary to craft a methodology that fits an organization’s culture
  • Proven ability to lead conversations with internal and external clients to extract business requirements and translate/distill stories into elegant and robust technical solutions
  • Strong application architect and developer, leveraging rapid prototyping and iterative development
  • Integrate solid communication skills and creative problem solving into every stage of development
  • Commitment to a hiring and collaborative philosophy which creates a cohesive, dynamic and passionate development culture

Experience

Public Broadcasting Service — 2005-Present

Senior Manager, Technology Solutions (2007-Present)

  • Successfully launched the nationally recognized PBS LearningMedia service that powers 40+ PBS/partner educational sites
  • Architected and developed the RESTful API service for the educational content service that runs PBS LearningMedia
  • Designed and converted our system architecture to a auto scaling, load balanced clusters with a configuration management system to allow for automated/repeatable deployment of our production/staging/development environments
  • Manage and inspire a team of 5 passionate, creative and diverse in-house developers along with multiple off site contractors
  • Coordinate all product releases and development as lead architect and developer
  • Direct projects through all phases of development (scope, requirements, use cases, design, prototyping, development and launch)
  • Originate budgeting, project scheduling and application & server architecture
  • Provide coordination with product management, program management, operations, IT and marketing/sales
  • Crafted a software development life-cycle that fit the culture of PBS and implemented it into project intake and development processes
  • Delivered multiple successful projects resulting in the growth of technical team from 2 to 6 individuals to accommodate demand

Manager, Digital Development (2007)

  • Demonstrated leadership as technical lead; managing multiple project timelines and deliverables; working with colleagues to identify and develop solutions to operational requirements and shortcomings
  • Negotiated with multiple companies to donate products and services to PBS resulting in recurring savings of over $40,000 (Atlassian, ExtJS, Github, etc.)

Senior Web Technologist (2005-2007)

  • Developed and maintained existing e-commerce portal and learning management system
  • Initiated transition to open source platform
  • Spearheaded introduction of version control and deployment processes into the product development cycle

Overview

  • 2010-Present: http://www.pbslm.org/

    Python, Django, Solr, REST, MongoDB, Chef, Nginx, Gunicorn, SASS/Compass, Amazon EC2/RDS/S3/CloudFront/LB, Mustache Templates, Backbone.js, Message Queues, Vagrant

  • 2006-Present: http://www.pbs.org/peerconnection/ & http://www.pbs.org/teacherline/

    Python, Django, WSGI, Solr/Lucene, HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Apache, MySQL, Amazon EC2, RabbitMQ, Xapian, XMl-RPC, Paypal Payflow Pro, SSL

  • 2005-2006: Retired site was replaced by Django site

    ColdFusion, Java, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Microsoft IIS, Microsoft SQL Server

Freelance Technical Consultant — 2009-Present

  • Worked with various companies to evolve collaborative development practices including:
  • Integrating aspects of the Agile process into existing team processes
  • Version Control workflows from CVS/SVN/Rsync based systems to a GIT based system with a branching model that allowed for better feature isolation, bugfixing and deployment planning

BearingPoint — 2004-2005

Systems Analyst

  • Built a suite of enterprise web applications using PL/SQL (Oracle 9iAS)
  • Assisted client program managers in tracking and running metrics on their planned acquisitions and existing contracts
PL/SQL, PHP, Oracle 9iAS, HTML, CSS, Javascript

Textron Lycoming — 1998-2004

Freelance Web Development Consultant

  • Designed and provided ongoing development and maintenance of national award-winning dynamic Internet site to allow customers to access company resources (JSP with DB2 backend)
  • Created and introduced, with continuing development and maintenance, a unique Intranet site providing executives and employees access to critical business and process information. (ASP with Oracle backend)
  • Developed numerous custom applications and tools to solve unique client problems involving the conversion, automation, and filtering of business data (Visual Basic, PHP, ASP, Excel, Access)
  • Created external marketing site, parts database
Java, JSP, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, DB2, Microsoft IIS, ASP, Oracle

Electronic Data Systems — 1998-1999

Technical Support

  • Independently installed, repaired and troubleshot over 300 computers
  • Provided needed hardware and software support to the client
  • Maintained and assisted in the development of a network infrastructure for over 300 computers

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, B.S. in Computer Science, College of Engineering – 2000-2004 GPA: 3.4, Dean’s List

Skill Sets

Software Development

  • Languages: Python, Java, SQL, C#, ASP, PHP, Javascript, CSS, HTML, XML/XSLT, ColdFusion, Perl, C/C++, Ruby
  • Technologies: AJAX, REST, SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS, RegEx, Selenium Automated Testing, OpenID, OAuth, SASS/Compass, Mustache Templates, Chef
  • Methodologies: Design patterns, Object-oriented design, Test-driven development, Agile development teams
  • Frameworks: Django, .NET, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, jQuery, YUI, ExtJS, Backbone.js
  • Concepts: SDLC, Agile/XP, RUP, Continuous Integration, Rapid Prototyping, Unit Testing, Database Design/(De)Normalization, Distributed Processing, A/B Testing, High Availability, Load Balancing, Performance Tuning, SEO, Web Analytics Tracking, Browser and System-level Caching, API driven architecture

System Architecture

  • Web: Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, Microsoft IIS, memcached
  • Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, MSSQL Server, MongoDB
  • Platforms: Linux, OSX, Windows, Amazon EC2/S3/EBS/RDS/CloudFront
  • Message Queues: RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS
  • Search: Solr/Lucene, Xapian, Sphinx
  • Version Control: GIT, Subversion, complex branch-merge workflows, MS Visual SourceSafe

Honors

  • Received PCWeek magazine’s 1999 Fast Track Technology Innovations Award for Textron Lycoming website.
  • Rated 4th place on “The Top 100” list of world-wide manufacturing companies “deploying leading-edge technologies”
  • Recognized for achievement with six PBS “Bravo” performance awards over four and a half years
  • Selected to present my “Pluggable Resuable Application” Design Pattern at DjangoCon ‘09