About Dan
My background is in Web development, especially full-stack development using the Django and Ruby on Rails frameworks. I'm from Wayne, Pennsylvania and graduated Penn State in 2007. I previously lived in Bethesda, MD, and Philadelphia. I moved to the Jersey shore in 2021.
My wife Lili and I have two amazing daughters, and seeing them both embrace video games and tech has been really awesome. Personally, I love playing pinball, watching the Phillies, and listening to audiobooks about computer programming, productivity, and startup stories.
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at CDK Global, where I work on the Roadster platform. Our product makes the car-buying process easier for consumers by allowing them to get upfront pricing, and complete most of the paperwork remotely, before stepping foot into the dealership. It also makes the selling process easier for the employees at the dealership, allowing them to make more sales and improve customer satisfaction. I work alongside 25 developers, developing the platform using the Ruby on Rails framework. Recently I've been focused on our ops, specifically improving our response time and availability, and fostering engineering practices that ensure ongoing success.
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Technical Skills
Python
Ruby
JavaScript
HTML5 / CSS3
Django
Rails
MySQL
Postgres
Elasticsearch
Work Experience
present
Roadster/CDK Global
Senior Software Engineer • Remote
- Develop Ruby on Rails code for Roadster, a web based product that enables car dealerships to maximize their omnichannel sales.
- Create chaotic good by becoming an unofficial leader after company was acquired twice in 2021 and then five senior engineers left. Picked up the slack in the team's workload along with the remaining team.
- Manage ops including Heroku and Cloudflare resources. Construct strong culture of being proactive on security, tech debt, and having direct engineering ownership over ops. This unique stance led to Roadster being CDK's only product to remain online during a large ransomware attack in June 2024.
- Provide expertise and implement features in the areas of application security, identity management, and single sign-on.
- Create new Flask app, a report generation layer within Roadster, where users are securely handed off between the two systems. Enables analytics team code reports in Python, even though Roadster is in Ruby. Solved a major headache for the org in under two weeks, and saved ~$65k/year perpetually on software licenses.
- Motivated the team to resolve any and all recurring ops disruptions, leading to a 99% average Apdex score in New Relic.
- Helped onboard eight new developers, gave code reviews, shielded team from operational chaos.
May 2021
U.S. News & World Report
Senior Software Engineer • Washington, DC
- Developed backend Python/Django code for a high-traffic media Web site, U.S. News Best Cars.
- Created the backend portion of the “car finder” faceted search.
- Implemented revamped logic in car scoring used throughout the site.
- Completed dozens of partner integrations.
- Completed two major Django upgrades. Completed a Python 2.7 to 3.7 upgrade.
- Assisted devops team in migrating from our own hardware to AWS.
- Changed the inventory search from MySQL to Elasticsearch and made other code optimizations, reducing its load time by 88%.
- Completed a sitewide URL restructure and domain name change without hurting SEO.
- Created functionality for dealer-specific pages.
- Mentored six new developers on product, infrastructure and setting up environments.
- Regularly did code reviews, both as the reviewer and as the author.
- Actively participated in sprint plannings, daily standups, retros and product design meetings.
Jan 2016
WorkWave
Senior Software Engineer • Neptune, NJ
- Developed features on existing classic ASP application, an enterprise CRM for managing pest control and other field service companies.
- Overhauled internal documentation covering development environment setup, allowing new developers to get themselves up and running in hours rather than days.
- Trained three new developers on architecture of application, source control workflows, manipulating application data and completing other common maintenance tasks.
- Wrote complex SQL queries, optimized existing queries and performed one-time data updates.
April 2015
Bizyhood
Consultant • Remote
- Developed a Django application for start-up offering small business marketing tools.
- Completed projects requiring a variety of skills including consuming REST APIs, building a front-end with AJAX, designing a DB schema and authenticating users through oAuth.
