James Russo

May 2020 - Present

CTO & Lead Developer

Rusterclund Entertainment LLC

Small Self-Funded Startup Company (of 4) whose goal is to provide the next greatest interactive gaming experience while watching your favorite sporting event. As the CTO and Lead Developer, I have had to perform in many aspects, from research, to design and development, to deployment of infrastructure and code for testing/demo needs.

2020 - Present

Software Architect

Xenial (A Global Payments Company) [formally Sicom, formally RTI, Inc]

Daily Job Responsibilities:

Perform the final code review or merge/pull requests for multiple teams geographically distributed.
Participate in Stakeholder, Scrum, and Kanban meetings.
Provide technical design and guidance via Jira Tickets, Lucid Charts, and one-on-one meetings with team members.
Actively monitor production and non-production stacks and respond to alerts.
Ongoing lead of a small team that's sole responsibility is to finish out a feature & product within a time frame that should not be possible on paper (on an as-needed basis).

Note worthy contributions:

Building off the Win32 RTI Inc. application, I designed, prototyped, and started the development of the new Hybrid-Cloud Web application version of the product. This included finding a seam in the business layer code that could be abstracted into a new layer; for which the existing SOAP endpoints would continue to function unchanged and allow us to build a brand new JSON Restful API on top - coined the 'moatify pattern'.

While I still review all code that is related to this project, it has scaled out to multiple 5+ man teams working on various features aimed at replacing the Win32 application.
Designed and developed a near real-time data synchronization microservice that asynchronously detects changes to Employee data (40,000+) and sends it to our Point-of-Sale systems and Cloud-based services to reduce data duplication and manual key entry by our end users.
Active participant in Service Organization Control (SOC) 1 audit. Both in the compliance review meetings and active participant in rectifying any concerns. Leading to a successful SOC1 report on behalf of the organization/application.
Designed and developed an Identity Application microservice. This service first began as a JWT Issuer for the new web-based application, then later grew in responsibilities by handling all Basic Authentication for the 30+-year-old application & a facade to a MultiFactor Authentication Service. The application handle migrating the user account automatically.
Designed a microservice dedicated to Fair Workweek Legislature for various State, City, and County jurisdictions in the U.S.A. The team performed the actual implementation under my guidance & review.
Designed a Notification microservice that's responsibility is to send emails, text messages, and push notifications to end users. The actual implementation was performed by the team under my guidance & review.
Consolidated a logging pattern throughout 25+ applications to utilize NLog for all application-level logging. Then installed and configured filebeats to push logs to LogStash.

AWS ECS JWT Angular Nginx RabbitMQ SQS .NET Core 6 MsSQL ELK MFA Octopus Deploy JIRA Lucid

2017 - 2020

Senior Developer

Sicom Systems [formally RTI, Inc]

Daily Job Responsibilities:

Perform the final code review on merge/pull requests for multiple teams geographically distributed.
Develop & maintain a Xamarin mobile application used by end users.
Continued bug & feature development on the RTI, Inc application.

Note worthy contributions:

Rewrote the Xamarin mobile application to follow an MVVM design pattern & eliminate race conditions throughout the code base.
Designed & developed a data ingress system that was deployed to a specific subnet of the infrastructure that was allowed to reach outside the business firewalls.
Installed & configured a Docker Registry (twice - for different teams)
Designed a backup & restore solution for developers to obtain a copy of sanitized data of production for development support (using docker).
Improved the speed of the RTI Win32 SOAP payroll calculation system (by 50%) by converting the code from a linear code style to an object-oriented design with TPL (.NET Task Parallel Library) sprinkled carefully throughout for optimization. The improvement was made via a "seam" so that the existing code base was none the wiser. This required transforming from the original data structure (DataSets) into a specific set of classes and a new set of routines.
Created a development process that has an audit trail for all queries executed against the Production Environment (both READ and WRITE).
Developed infrastructure that would identify connections where dropped from RabbitMQ permanently and would restart the appropriate software.

RabbitMQ Xamarin Jira Docker CentOS MariaDB .NET Framework 4.7.2

May 2016 - 2017

Software Developer

RTI, Inc.

Daily Job Responsibilities:

Perform updates and add features on a 30+-year-old Win32 Application.
Participate in both Scrum & Kanban meetings.
Develop & maintain the Xamarin mobile application used by end users.

Note worthy contributions:

Introduced Development Team to RabbitMQ.
Developed a microservice that performed data ingestion into MSSQL for 3500 stores in under 15 minutes.
Developed a series of supporting web-based applications based on ASP.NET MVC for internal support teams.
Refactored an existing Windows Service that would take hours to complete a single batch of processing, to utilize RabbitMQ and multiple consumers to process in under 1 hour.
Created a private NuGet server to better distribute DLLs for the Win32 Application.
Installed and configured a GitLab Server Community instance & migrated source code from "Vault". Then designed & implemented a development process with GitLab Merge Requests feature.
Improved application build times and deployment times after noticing it would take hours to build and several hours to deploy. Using GitLab as a CI tool and Octopus Deploy as the deployment tool of choice. I pitched the Octopus Deploy product, prototyped it, and presented a business analysis for approval (which was approved). Builds & deployments went from 4+ hours with manual steps to a button press and 30 minutes, all automated.
Identified a transactional problem with the deployment process when performing DDL updates & identified a major bottleneck within the same process. Designed and replaced the process with a "migration" based approach that provided full transactional coverage when migrating the database and reduced the time from an hour to seconds.

RabbitMQ Xamarin MsSQL .NET Framework 4.5+ .NET Core 1.0-2.0 GitLab CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery) VB.NET/C# NuGet WinForms ASP.NET MVC

January 2016 - April 2016

Database Administrator (PeopleSoft)

Southeastern Louisiana University

Acting Database Administrator and developer for Southeastern's PeopleSoft installation. Implemented new features for the University's personnel. Created and submitted bug fixes using the PeopleSoft development platform.

April 2012 - December 2015

Software Developer

PrimTek LLC

Served as lead developer & business analyst for dynamic form entry product.
Introduced company to Xamarin, .NET MVC, and Azure products.
Developed custom CMS framework using .NET Framework and porting features from WebForms based version.

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