Summary
- 20+ years commanding and implementing spec-level knowledge of front-end web
standards (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
- 20+ years practicing full-stack web development (including LAMP, Node.js, Ruby on
Rails)
- 15+ years publishing and presenting talks and workshops on web development topics
for technical and non-specialist audiences
- 15 years teaching, coaching, and mentoring software developers, information
architects, and technical writers
- 10+ years serving as a technical reviewer for industry and academic publications
and conferences
Experience
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- Maintained code supporting product documentation (React, Next.js) and company
blog (Ghost Pro)
- Updated product documentation to ensure concord with product API features in
production
- Reviewed pull requests on product and documentation maintained in a monorepo;
also demo code in modular repositories
- Prepared a 90-minute online workshop to showcase the Daily Prebuilt product
to an audience of external developers
- Coached and offered editorial feedback to engineer-writers in the preparation
of technical blog posts
- Collaborated effectively and asynchronously with coworkers from across the
globe
Illinois Institute of Technology, www.iit.edu (Chicago, IL)
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Associate Professor of Information Technology and Management (tenured)
- Created and taught original web-specialization courses on front-end
development, Ruby on Rails, RESTful data API design & consumption, and Node.js
- Structured courses in web development to emphasize agile development backed
by version control (Git) and automated testing (Mocha, Test::Unit), as well as
visual regression testing (BackstopJS)
- Coached student engineers in writing commit messages, inline documentation,
and release notes as well as effective use of synchronous and asynchronous
communication channels (Basecamp, Discord, Slack)
- Developed and taught new courses that were adopted as the department standard
for other instructors to follow, including Fundamentals of Web Development,
Human-Computer Interaction and Web Design, and Web Systems Integration
(microservices and APIs)
- Delivered classroom instruction, interacted, and collaborated with fully
remote students and student teams via synchronous and asynchronous communication
channels
- Advised and coached students from various computational disciplines engaged
in graduate- and undergraduate-level research and programming projects—including
fielding technical questions about codebases and languages outside my core
expertise
-
Associate Professor of Digital Writing & Rhetoric (tenured)
Assistant Professor of Technical Communication
- Taught a two-course sequence in standards-based web design and web
application fundamentals (HTML, CSS, vanilla JS; Ruby on Rails) to students
without programming backgrounds
- Created and offered courses on information architecture, knowledge
management, and technical editing
- Advised and directed thesis or capstone projects for approximately 50 masters
students and 15 PhD students
- Designed, installed, and maintained a 20-workstation instructional computer
lab and backing server in collaboration with university librarians (triple-booted
into Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu Linux)
- Administered and maintained departmental Linux servers for internal
information-sharing and email lists
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Webmaster, Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
- Designed, developed, and maintained a custom content management system on the
LAMP stack
- Ensured site accessibility via user-testing and assessed conformance with
Section 508 and WCAG, Level Double-A
- Achieved and maintained number-one Google SEO result for writing
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Graduate Teaching Assistant
- Designed and taught original courses in web design and development;
multimedia authoring and video production; technical writing; business
communication; introductory writing
- Enrolled in four semester-long graduate-level teaching practicums to develop
formal command of instructional methods and their underlying theories of learning
and education
Community and Open-Source Contributions
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- Served as a technical reviewer for numerous books, including Trevor Burnham’s
Asynchronous JavaScript, Faraz Kelhini’s Modern Asynchronous
JavaScript and High-Performance Text Processing, and Erica
Sadun’s Numerical Brain Teasers
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Mozilla Developer Network (MDN)
- Served as open-source contributor to MDN’s best-in-industry documentation,
browser compatibility data, and code for interactive examples
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The Newberry Library Digital Collections for Classroom Use
- Developed and deployed to production a custom Ruby on Rails application to
replace POC developed on Omeka
- Integrated with the Dropbox API to enable Chicago Public School teachers to
build custom lesson plans around The Newberry’s digital resources
- McGraw-Hill (consulted on educational digital-resource delivery, 2010)
- Illinois Tech Research Institute (IITRI; consulted on web accessibility, 2009)
- Illinois Tech Banner Web Group (consulted on ethical, accessible search-engine
optimization, 2008)
Recent Publications, Presentations, and Appearances
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy, Purdue University. West Lafayette, IN, 2007.
- Master of Arts, Purdue University. West Lafayette, IN, 2002.
- Bachelor of Arts, Millikin University. Decatur, IL, 2000.
Selected Skills
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Web platform: HTML, CSS, JavaScript; ARIA, ARIA in HTML, WCAG, Section 508;
real-time Web APIs: WebSockets, WebRTC, Web Components. Preprocessors: Haml, Less,
Sass/SCSS, CoffeeScript. Responsive design; intrinsic design; progressive web
applications (PWAs). Progressive enhancement. Accessibility. User-centered design.
User experience.
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Web frameworks and servers: Node.js, Express.js, Socket.io, PM2. Ruby,
Sinatra, Ruby on Rails, Puma. Jekyll, Hugo. Apache, Nginx.
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Development environments and tools: Unix/Linux, macOS. Git, GitHub.
Subversion. Notion, Linear, Bugzilla. TravisCI. Markdown.
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Design and video-production tools: Figma, Pixelmator, Concepts. Final Cut Pro.
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Writing and editorial: The Chicago Manual of Style; Garner’s Modern English
Usage.