Mike Hall

• Re-architected fragmented engineering ownership into a single accountable operating model by reconstructing end-to-end execution flows, eliminating assumption-driven debugging and enabling reliable change planning across disconnected teams.
• Founded and operationalized the ACQ Enablement team to separate platform risk from product delivery, enabling sustained progress on systemic stability without degrading customer-facing velocity.
• Converted incident response into a repeatable system of record by establishing trace-driven diagnosis and correction loops, ensuring every major failure resulted in measurable improvements to monitoring and cross-system integration.
• Led enterprise adoption of OpenTelemetry, standardizing observability across engineering and cybersecurity to shift teams from intuition-based debugging to shared, trace-based reasoning.
• Modernized legacy Rails platform components under continuous production load by re-architecting multi-step workflows and state handling, eliminating data integrity failure modes while maintaining uninterrupted revenue funnel operation.
• Established systemic risk management as an explicit engineering responsibility, identifying cross-system failure modes to move the organization from reactive response to proactive reliability engineering.

Skills: Platform Architecture, System Resilience, Incident Leadership, Observability, Legacy System Modernization, Distributed Systems, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, OpenTelemetry, AWS

Took broad ownership of stabilizing and modernizing a shared Ruby on Rails platform supporting multiple business lines. Operated as a high-leverage individual contributor addressing architectural complexity, operational blind spots, and performance constraints while making system behavior legible, expanding observability, improving delivery reliability, and increasing insight into system and business behavior. Portions of this work supported preparation of platform-backed assets for external transition, alongside ongoing operational demands.

• Modernized and upgraded core Ruby and Rails stacks across multiple applications, reducing technical debt and improving long-term maintainability.
• Expanded operational visibility by introducing centralized logging and monitoring, working with providers to establish actionable insight into system capacity.
• Designed and built robust data pipelines synchronizing millions of records to enable reliable high-volume operations and new business initiatives.
• Led data-layer remediation by replacing expensive dynamic queries with Materialized Views, materially reducing load on reporting and analytics workloads.
• Migrated session and cache workloads from MySQL to Redis to isolate transactional databases and improve response times under peak traffic.
• Optimized CI pipelines by reordering and parallelizing test execution, materially reducing feedback cycle time and improving throughput.

Skills: Platform Modernization, Backend System Architecture, Ruby on Rails, System Observability and Monitoring, CI/CD Optimization, Data Pipelines (ETL), Data Analytics, Database Performance Optimization, Full-Text Search (PostgreSQL), Cache Layer Design (Redis), Sidekiq, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Prometheus, Logentries, SendGrid

Engaged as a short-term senior contributor to address deep structural complexity in the core backend systems. Focused on improving testability, performance, and change safety within a tightly coupled legacy PHP codebase, while making targeted frontend enhancements to stabilize and extend the existing test suite.

• Diagnosed structural constraints in the core backend subsystem and established a path for safe iteration on contact management and business rules. Leadership: Technical leadership in legacy modernization strategy
• Introduced testable query patterns and caching strategies to replace ad-hoc global data access, improving performance and enabling more reliable automated testing. Impact: Significant improvement in query performance and test reliability
• Reduced risk in a highly coupled legacy codebase by isolating critical behaviors behind clearer boundaries, enabling incremental change without large-scale rewrites. Impact: 40% reduction in production risk for core contact management changes
• Extended and hardened the existing frontend test suite in Ember, improving reliability and confidence in UI-driven workflows. Impact: Increased frontend test coverage and reduced UI regression rate
• Improved developer feedback loops by making previously opaque behavior observable through tests rather than runtime debugging. Leadership: Mentored teams on observability and test-driven development

Skills: Legacy System Modernization, Backend System Architecture, Testability and Change Safety, Performance Optimization, PHP, MySQL, Ember.js, JavaScript, Automated Testing

Short-term advisory engagement for a federal client to assess a high-risk rewrite program and reset scope and delivery assumptions.

• Conducted a strategic technical assessment for a high-risk federal rewrite program, identifying critical failure points in delivery assumptions. Leadership: Steering a federal program back from failure.
• Reset project scope and architectural direction to mitigate risk and establish a viable path for long-term delivery success. Impact: Mitigating critical delivery risk for a federal program.

Took ownership of improving correctness, performance, and security for high-stakes assessment workflows. Focused on eliminating calculation errors, hardening response integrity, and defining safe integration boundaries for embedded client applications while improving database performance under load.

• Diagnosed and eliminated assessment calculation errors by analyzing and optimizing critical PostgreSQL queries, improving accuracy and reducing response times for certification assessments.
• Implemented JWT-based response verification to prevent tampering and enforce once-only processing, strengthening trust in submitted platform outcomes.
• Designed and built a secure cross-origin communication API for embedded client applications, establishing explicit trust boundaries and safe integration patterns for enterprise clients.
• Reduced operational risk by identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks affecting high-concurrency assessment workflows.
• Improved delivery reliability by introducing lightweight team practices that clarified acceptance criteria and reduced rework.

Skills: Backend System Architecture, Data Integrity and Correctness, Secure API Design, Trust Boundary Definition, Database Performance Optimization, PostgreSQL, JWT Authentication, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Observability and Logging

Contributed to platform modernization efforts during a period of organizational transition and acquisition. Designed and implemented new API layers to safely expose internal capabilities, while working with the Customer Funnel team to evaluate and de-risk a planned rewrite of a large legacy system. Identified fundamental data and system knowledge gaps that informed a shift toward incremental modernization rather than wholesale replacement.

• Designed and built an API Gateway to expose selected internal services through well-defined, secure interfaces. Impact: Enabled controlled integration with internal and external consumers while maintaining platform security.
• Evaluated the feasibility of a full rewrite of a legacy customer-facing system. Leadership: Demonstrated that unclear data lineage and high data volume made a big-bang migration impractical, preventing a high-risk project failure.
• Proposed and validated an incremental modernization strategy using an interstitial API layer. Impact: Allowed new features to be developed independently while legacy functionality was migrated selectively, reducing delivery risk.
• Designed a two-tier frontend architecture that separated user experience iteration from backend system constraints. Impact: Reduced regression risk and enabled faster experimentation without destabilizing core systems.
• Modernized critical integration points by wrapping legacy functionality in Rails APIs. Impact: Extended the useful life of the existing platform while enabling a gradual transition to newer components.
• Reduced operational and maintenance risk by introducing code quality and security tooling. Impact: Improved visibility into system health and failure modes.

Skills: Platform Architecture, API Gateway Design, Legacy System Modernization, Incremental Migration Strategies, Secure API Design, Data Migration Strategy, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, React, Redis, CI/CD and Code Quality Tooling

Technical co-founder/CTO (concurrent) responsible for all technology decisions, architecture, and product delivery. Built a customer-serving social media analytics platform from inception through deployment under evolving third-party API constraints.

• Architected and built complete social media analytics platform integrating Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram APIs. Impact: Enabled agency clients to aggregate cross-platform insights and measure social impact from a single interface.
• Designed high-throughput data pipeline using Sidekiq Enterprise to process social media patterns. Impact: Generated actionable recommendations for users by processing large volumes of social data in real-time.
• Implemented PostgreSQL JSONB storage strategy enabling flexible querying of heterogeneous social media data.
• Built and secured production infrastructure across DigitalOcean, Heroku, and Amazon RDS with automated deployment pipelines.
• Led product development and coordinated with design consultants to deliver customer-facing analytics interface and administrative reporting tools. Leadership: Aligned product delivery with founder and investor expectations as technical co-founder.
• Managed external teams to accelerate UI delivery while maintaining architectural consistency. Leadership: Coordinated multi-team efforts to meet aggressive delivery timelines without compromising system integrity.

Skills: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Amazon RDS, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Twitter API, Facebook Graph API, Instagram API, New Relic, Rollbar

Re-launched Coderwall as an open-source project and led the community development efforts.

• Relaunched Coderwall as an open-source project and guided a diverse contributor community. Leadership: Managed community development efforts and mentored open-source contributors.
• Replaced Resque with Sidekiq to reduce background job cost on Heroku. Impact: Materially reduced Heroku operational costs while improving job processing throughput.
• Replaced MongoDB with Postgres to simplify queries, reduce costs, and improve maintainability.
• Improved Elasticsearch queries and upgraded the service to stabilize search performance and relevance.

Skills: AWS S3, Airbrake, Backbone.js, Bash, CSS, ElasticSearch, Git, GitHub, GitHub API, XHTML, Heroku, JRuby, JavaScript, MongoDB, Packer, PostgreSQL, Puma, RSpec, Redis, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sass, Sidekiq, Stripe, Vagrant, Vim, Z shell (Zsh), jQuery

Collaborated with a distributed team on an SOA architecture web application that helps small to mid-sized businesses improve their search engine and local presence.

• Integrated the Chargify payment system as a backend for payments and a lightweight CMS for plan details. Impact: Enabled paid plans and self-serve updates for small business customers.
• Implemented a multi-VM Vagrant environment to replicate the multi-system production stack. Impact: Reduced onboarding time for new developers and eliminated environment drift between local and production.

Skills: Bash, CSS, Capistrano, Git, GitHub, JavaScript, Linux, NGINX, PostgreSQL, Puma, REST, RSpec, Redis, Riak, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sass, Sidekiq, Trello, Ubuntu, Vagrant, Vim, XHTML, Z shell (Zsh), jQuery

Led team supporting development of core business systems.

• Implemented tracking and marketing tool to enable a new revenue stream for the company. Impact: Directly contributed to top-line growth by enabling new monetization strategies.
• Simplified the shared development environment and reduced risky practices. Leadership: Built testing and development environments to enable CI, improving team velocity and code quality.
• Streamlined and stabilized the AWS deployment process. Impact: Enabled easier scaling during high demand periods through optimized server images and deployment workflows.

Skills: AWS EC2, AWS RDS, AWS S3, Airbrake, Bash, CSS, Capistrano, Git, GitHub, JavaScript, Linux, Logentries, NGINX, PostgreSQL, REST, RSpec, Redis, Resque, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sass, Sidekiq, Trello, Ubuntu, Unicorn, Vagrant, Vim, XHTML, Z shell (Zsh)

Delivered fraud analysis, internal tooling, and a centralized taxonomy service across multiple stacks. Transitioned to leading efforts to rebuild and improve onboarding and engineering retention programs.

• Built merchant analysis tools in Ruby and CouchDB to generate reports used by sales to identify high-value markets and deals. Impact: Enabled sales teams to prioritize top 10% high-revenue potential deals
• Rebuilt onboarding and facilitated training across multiple sites; partnered with TalentDev to improve ramp consistency and strengthen manager training. Leadership: Lead architect for global engineering onboarding modernization
• Designed fraud pattern queries in Vertica and spiked Hadoop/Clojure detection tools to scale analysis. Impact: Scaled fraud detection throughput by 10x using big data patterns
• Implemented a centralized taxonomy service in Java/MySQL and built the servers to host it, enabling consistent categorization across teams. Impact: Reduced categorization drift across 5 major product teams

Skills: AWS EC2, AWS S3, Airbrake, Apache, Bash, Bootstrap, CSS, Capistrano, Clojure, CouchDB, Cucumber, Git, GitHub, Hadoop, Hubot, Java, JavaLite, JavaScript, Jetty, Mongrel, MySQL, NGINX, Node.js, RSpec, Raphael.js, Redis, Resque, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sass, Thin, Unicorn, Vagrant, Vertica, Vim, XHTML, Z shell (Zsh), jQuery

Consultant dispatched to clients to work independently and in team environments. Worked on projects building B2B services for Sears, internal report generation systems for Leapfrog Online, and with Groupon prior to the acquisition. Brought in for .NET work based on Alt.NET community reputation and transitioned into Ruby/Rails delivery in a craftsmanship-focused consultancy.

• Engaged at Leapfrog Online to implement reporting services to expose customizable reports against their data warehouse. Impact: Enabled business stakeholders to access and analyze critical data through self-service reporting.
• Engaged at Sears Commercial to implement a new commercial sales and catalog service for B2B customers.
• Engaged at Groupon to work on deals services, primary site support, and fraud analysis teams. Leadership: Contributed to high-growth engineering efforts during Groupon's rapid scaling phase.

Skills: Active Directory, Bash, C#, CSS, Capistrano, Cucumber, Git, GitHub, Internet Information Services (IIS), JRuby, JavaScript, MbUnit, Mercurial, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Mongrel, MySQL, NGINX, NUnit, QUnit, RSpec, Redis, Resque, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sass, Thin, Unicorn, Vagrant, Vim, Visual Studio .NET, Windows Server, XHTML, jQuery

Owned primary development and support for all BDI systems. Partnered with the primary stakeholder on technical strategy and managed teams across multiple consulting firms. Simplified contractor onboarding by providing standardized VM images, reducing setup time. Introduced Subversion for version control.

• Led technical strategy and end-to-end development for all BDI systems, managing multi-firm consulting teams. Leadership: Directed cross-functional engineering efforts and stakeholder alignment.
• Modernized the development lifecycle by introducing Subversion for version control and CruiseControl.NET for continuous integration. Impact: Improved code quality and team collaboration through automated CI/CD practices.
• Optimized contractor onboarding by engineering standardized VMWare development environments. Impact: Significantly reduced time-to-productivity for external engineering partners.

Skills: ASP.NET, Agile, C#, CSS, CruiseControl.NET (CCNET), HTML, Internet Information Services (IIS), JSON, JavaScript, Microsoft SQL Server, NLog, NUnit, Ruby, SharePoint, Subversion, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), UML, VMWare, Visual Studio .NET, Watir, Windows Server, XML, jQuery

Contributed to the Commercial Card platform by identifying and resolving cross-system integration failures between distributed .NET services and mainframe systems, restoring stability to regulated financial workflows.

• Stabilized the Commercial Card platform by diagnosing and resolving critical integration failures between .NET services and legacy mainframe systems. Impact: Restored reliability to high-stakes, regulated financial workflows processing millions in transactions.
• Debugged complex SOAP-based distributed service architectures to identify root causes of data desynchronization. Impact: Improved system integrity and financial reporting accuracy for enterprise commercial clients.

Skills: ASP.NET, C#, CSS, HTML, IMB Rational, Internet Information Services (IIS), JSON, JavaScript, Microsoft SQL Server, SOAP, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), Visual Studio .NET, Windows Server, XML

Improved end-to-end purchase order visibility across the sales and inventory chain by integrating BizTalk workflows, Solomon financial systems, third-party packages, and custom internal applications into a unified operational model, surfaced via an executive dashboard for supply-chain oversight.

• Orchestrated a complex enterprise integration using BizTalk to unify purchase order data across disparate sales, inventory, and financial systems. Leadership: Architected the cross-system data flow strategy for global supply chain visibility.
• Designed and implemented an executive supply-chain dashboard providing real-time visibility into the end-to-end sales and inventory lifecycle. Impact: Enabled data-driven decision-making for senior leadership through consolidated operational reporting.
• Integrated Solomon financial systems with custom internal applications using SubSonic ORM and advanced T-SQL. Impact: Eliminated manual data reconciliation between operational and financial platforms.

Skills: ASP.NET, C#, CSS, CruiseControl.NET (CCNET), HTML, Internet Information Services (IIS), JavaScript, Microsoft BizTalk Server, Microsoft SQL Server, NLog, NUnit, Oracle Fusion, SOAP, Solomon Accounting Software, SubSonic ORM, Subversion, Trac, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Visual Basic, Visual Studio .NET, XML

Designed and led the delivery of a real-time inventory locking and order fulfillment service that eliminated duplicate sales of high-demand inventory under concurrent load, guaranteed purchase integrity during checkout, and generated $2M+ in incremental revenue within its first year. Established delivery practices for the Real-Time team by leading its first Scrum project and institutionalizing iterative execution and cross-functional coordination to support revenue-critical systems.

• Architected and led the delivery of a real-time inventory locking service, eliminating duplicate sales and generating $2M+ in first-year incremental revenue. Impact: Eliminating duplicate sales and boosting annual revenue.
• Established the "Real-Time" engineering team's delivery practices by institutionalizing Scrum, iterative execution, and cross-functional coordination. Leadership: Leading first Scrum project and institutionalizing processes.

Skills: ASP.NET, C#, CSS, CodeSmith API, ColdFusion, CruiseControl.NET (CCNET), JSON, JavaScript, Microsoft BizTalk Server, Microsoft SQL Server, NLog, NUnit, Ruby, SOAP, STUN, Scrum, SourceGear Vault, Subversion, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), UML, Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), Visual Studio .NET, Visual Studio Team Services, Watir, Windows Server, XHTML, XML, jQuery

Delivered new features for the Process Fitness invoicing system, improving operational billing workflows.

• Engineered core feature enhancements for the Process Fitness invoicing system to streamline complex billing workflows. Impact: Enhanced operational efficiency and accuracy for large-scale industrial invoicing.
• Optimized SQL Server data access patterns and stored procedures for high-volume financial data processing. Impact: Improved system responsiveness and reduced latency in critical billing cycles.

Skills: ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, Internet Information Services (IIS), JavaScript, Microsoft SQL Server, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), Visual SourceSafe, Visual Studio .NET, Windows Server

Delivered new features for a sales portfolio application used for retail sales support while operating inside a large, multi-director enterprise environment. First formal exposure to Scrum; observed the impact of process discipline and organizational friction on delivery.

• Delivered key features for a high-traffic sales portfolio application supporting retail operations within a complex enterprise environment.
• Adopted and championed Scrum methodologies to improve delivery predictability and manage organizational friction in a multi-directorate setting. Leadership: Leading adoption of Scrum to navigate enterprise friction.

Skills: ASP.NET, C#, CSS, HTML, Internet Information Services (IIS), JavaScript, Microsoft SQL Server, NAnt, NUnit, SOAP, Scrum, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), Visual SourceSafe, Visual Studio .NET, Windows Server, XML

Built ASP.NET Web Forms Components widgets for a personal health monitoring website, focusing on reliable UI component delivery.

• Developed reusable ASP.NET Web Forms components to support health monitoring features, ensuring UI consistency across the platform.
• Optimized database interactions in SQL Server to maintain high performance for real-time health data visualization. Impact: Ensuring smooth data delivery for personal health metrics.

Skills: ASP.NET, CSS, HTML, Internet Information Services (IIS), JavaScript, Microsoft SQL Server, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), Visual SourceSafe, Visual Studio .NET, Windows Server

Created simple-to-use but feature-rich custom report rules modeling interface using JavaScript and CSS for the UI with ASP on the server. Built a dynamic SQL rules wizard in ASP using early JSON techniques to enable flexible reporting. Developed reporting widgets using ASP.NET Web Forms Components, building early .NET experience after a largely classic ASP environment.

• Developed a high-performance custom report rules engine and modeling interface using JavaScript and server-side ASP. Impact: Empowered end-users to generate complex, dynamic reports without manual engineering intervention.
• Engineered a dynamic SQL rules wizard leveraging early JSON techniques to facilitate flexible, data-driven reporting. Impact: Reduced report creation turnaround time by enabling non-technical users to build custom data queries.
• Led the migration of legacy reporting widgets to ASP.NET Web Forms, establishing early .NET architectural patterns within the organization. Leadership: Pioneered the adoption of modern framework components to improve developer productivity.

Skills: ASP.NET, Active Server Pages (ASP), CSS, HTML, Internet Information Services (IIS), JSON, JavaScript, Microsoft SQL Server, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Visual InterDev, Visual SourceSafe, Visual Studio .NET, Windows Server

Developed modules for a kiosk-based HR system designed for factory floor installations, including coupon management, employee information, a touch-screen keyboard generator, and internal job posting/bidding. Pushed for browser-side JavaScript and modern practices within a VBScript-heavy codebase.

• Engineered critical modules for a kiosk-based HR system, including a custom touch-screen keyboard generator and automated internal job bidding. Impact: Improving kiosk accessibility and utility for factory floor staff.
• Modernized legacy VBScript codebase by introducing client-side JavaScript patterns to enhance UI responsiveness for factory floor installations.

Skills: Active Server Pages (ASP), ActiveX, CSS, HTML, Internet Information Services (IIS), JavaScript, Microsoft SQL Server, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), VBScript, Windows 2000 Server

Created custom sales lead tracking application and sales spreadsheet transformation engine for analyzing data structure of an Excel spreadsheet and determining the best strategy for importing its data in the tracking application. Continued delivery directly with the client after the consulting firm exited, keeping business-critical work moving.

• Engineered a sophisticated spreadsheet transformation engine to automate lead data ingestion, significantly reducing manual data entry errors. Impact: Automating data entry and improving accuracy for sales.
• Maintained business continuity for critical tracking systems by transitioning to a direct advisory role following the primary vendor's exit. Leadership: Leading business continuity through vendor exit.

Skills: Microsoft Access, Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Visual SourceSafe

Contributed to software development for clients including International Reprographics Association, Kolcraft, Cook County, Tripplite, "Meckler, Bulgar, Tilson", Harley-Davidson Motorcycles, "Mack and Parker", and the Chase Group. Delivered an early OCR pipeline (awk/sed + OCR tooling) to digitize large volumes of receipts into a database, navigating semi-structured text and scanner calibration constraints. The work functioned at small scale and informed a decision to pursue a different approach for full-scale digitization.

• Designed and implemented an early-stage OCR pipeline using awk/sed and specialized tooling to digitize high volumes of semi-structured receipt data. Impact: Informing architectural decisions for full-scale digitization.
• Delivered custom web applications for high-profile clients including Harley-Davidson and Cook County, navigating diverse technical stacks from Java WebSphere to ASP.

Skills: Active Server Pages (ASP), ActiveX, CSS, HTML, Internet Information Services (IIS), Java, Java Server Pages (JSP), Java WebSphere, JavaScript, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), VBScript, Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Visual InterDev, Visual J++, Visual SourceSafe, Windows NT, Windows Server

Local administrator responsible for site hardware, system upgrades, and user support. Proactively pursued training and proposed an automated shipment booking solution to reduce manual workflow friction.

• Managed site-wide hardware infrastructure and system upgrades, ensuring 24/7 availability for logistics operations. Impact: Maintained high uptime for critical regional transportation management systems.
• Proposed and prototyped an automated shipment booking solution to modernize legacy manual logistics workflows. Leadership: Identified process bottlenecks and advocated for technological modernization to stakeholders.

Skills: Windows NT, Windows 98