Brian Lee

Full Stack Developer

Brian Lee is a generalist who is always looking to learn more and improve his skills.

Work Experience

CyberGRX

Denver, CO
Senior Engineer
2020 - Present

In June of 2020 Brian returned to the startup world as a full-time remote Senior Engineer. His first major project was expediting the onboarding of new customers by developing a service that automated first-time user sign up. During this project Brian successfully established a culture of Test Driven Development within his team which resulted in the service going live without needing any major rework, and a 30% improvement in conversion rate. He then architected a system for sending notifications to users based on Event Sourcing; using the same TDD principles as the previous project he and the team were able to release the feature to production without any gaps in functionality and with reduced manual testing compared to other features.

  • Drove culture of Test-Driven Development which dramatically reduced defect rate
  • Measurably improved new-user conversion rate
  • Provided users with actionable notifications

Cox Automotive

Dallas, TX
Senior Engineer
2018 - 2020

In February of 2018 Brian moved into the enterprise environment when he started working at the Data Solutions division at Cox Automotive. Brian's first project was to provide reliable database deployment. Working in PostgresQL, Brian developed a Dockerized system that not only allowed zero downtime deploys but also cached tables for high-volume consumer use. Moving to the frontend, Brian spearheaded a React+Redux application for managing vehicle data. Once that application was live, Brian went head first into machine learning by modifying a classifier designed to unify vehicle data across the many companies owned by Cox Automotive. After the model was proven, Brian began working on providing an auditable trail of changes on vehicle data performed by his React+Redux application. Leveraging his years of Elasticsearch experience, Brian developed an API that allowed easy mapping updates, simple interfaces for indexing, and automated deployment.

  • Database backups with API response caching
  • Single page app for managing vehicle data
  • Searchable audit history of vehicle data

Shapiro+Raj

Chicago, IL
Full Stack Developer
2016 - 2018

In April of 2016, MutualMind, Inc was acquired by Shapiro+Raj. Brian's first project under the new management was a Twitter author search that allowed researchers to find people based on their personal attributes. This project tapped into MutualMind's proprietary bank of over 80 million twitter accounts to provide search and analytics with blazing speed. Following this success, Brian developed a hierarchical survey data visualizer on top of an extensible Elasticsearch query builder, which allowed analysts and clients to view all their historical surveys longitudinally. With the quantitative data tackled, Brian moved on to developing an interactive transcript browser with search and video clipping, which reduced the number man-hours wasted on watching videos by an order of magnitude. To further the dream of an end-to-end qualitative product, Brian built a social outreach platform that automated recruitment and sample gathering. This included a more friendly onboarding process and numerous integrations with social products and APIs. Behind the scenes, record keeping of the Django database was simplified with a DRY model tracking interface.

Other notable developments included:

  • Custom, flexible notifications framework
  • Documentation for code, infrastructure, and best practices powered by Sphinx
  • Text coding application for organizing transcripts

MutualMind, Inc

Addison, TX
Full Stack Developer
2013 - 2016

Brian's first job out of college was working on a real-time social listening product. From day one Brian identified pain points for clients, account team and developers; his first project was transitioning the company off Subversion to Git and implementing Gitflow. Then Brian discovered the need to define and visualize a domain-specific language for searching all of social media. This involved using a parsing-expression grammar on top of PEG.js and Node.js to provide users with a consistent experience when configuring their marketing campaigns. Once user's campaigns were configured, the data would need to be visualized on big screens in executive's offices. Brian solved this by building a highly reliable Backbone and D3 app that plugged into a custom WebSocket backend. Brian lead the SaltStack transition when all of MutualMind's servers were transitioned from Rackspace to Softlayer in 2014.

Other notable developments included:

  • Developed Adaptive Listening, which can be thought as IFTTT for social media data
  • Reusable analytics package for interfacing with ElasticSearch
  • Several integrations with IBM products, including Watson and Bluemix

University of North Texas/National Science Foundation

Denton, TX
Research Assistant
2010 - 2013

Brian's first paid development experience was on a research project at the University of North Texas. He developed a web application on the Yii framework that facilitated schedule management for professors and students. The application was then provided for use to an international group in Panama, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Brian managed the servers that hosted his instance of the application, including upgrades of major versions of Ubuntu and Debian.

Other notable developments included:

  • wtmp and inotify powered daemon that updated a web interface with the number of concurrent users of a server
  • long-polling and MySQL powered puzzle game designed for kids

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

University of North Texas
2009 - 2013
Brian Lee completed his CS degree with a cumulative GPA of 3.0. Throughout his time at UNT, Brian worked with a focus on Linux administration and programming in a UNIX-like environment. Brian's favorite classes were ones that allowed him the freedom to solve problems creatively.

Professional Skills

Top Skills

Python & Django

Expert, 8 years
Brian has specialized in Python and Django is where he feels most at home. Django allows him to build robust applications with speed and flexibility. Python's variety of supported programming paradigms allows Brian's functional programming interests to thrive alongside Django's largely object-oriented architecture.

DevOps

Advanced, 5 years
Brian has developed configuration and managed infrastructure for high availablility and reliability. His long time experience with Gentoo and a wide variety of other Linux flavors and BSDs combined with his full stack experience gives him a unique point of view on complex systems.

JavaScript

Advanced, 4 years
Brian's JavaScript experience spans from writing vanilla JS with jQuery to writing carefully componentized React apps. His skills flourished at MutualMind while developing their Command Center product; a live-updating social media display powered by D3, Backbone, and SockJS.

Other Skills

AWS CSS3 D3 Django Docker ElasticSearch
Functional Programming HTML5 Git Language Grammars
Machine Learning Prototyping React SaltStack WebSockets

Portfolio

Contact

Send me an email at contact@brian-l.ee or message me on linkedin.com/in/brian-l/