2021/01 - 2022/04. Lead Researcher, Research and Development Architecture Department Developer Team Lead. LearningMate

January 2021 - April 2022

Senior Technical Lead Research and Development Technology Architect

LearningMate, United States and India – www.learningmate.com

MARKET: Education, Online Education, Communication, Streaming, LMS, and Media

LearningMate has more than 1,200 employees world-wide creating and employing products and services to build and connect digital channels to enable the free flow of content, data, and learning.

Supervised and worked daily with teams in India, Canada, Bulgaria, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Washington, & elsewhere.

Narrative

Coming Soon.

Statistics, Roles, & Responsibilities

MANAGEMENT

• Interview and train new staff in development and infrastructure roles.

• Prepare and manage project budgets

• Requisition, interview, hire, and manage additional outsourced contractors as needed when specialized skill set not available from LearningMate’s pool of 1,000+ employees

• Engage others throughout the solution delivery process to provide design acceptance, understand and plan for infrastructure impacts, plan for and validate functional and non-functional requirements, ensure compliance with secure development standards.

• Continuous integration / continuous delivery CI/CD.

• Depending on the project, classical waterfall, Agile, or Agile hybrid project management (please no waterfall in sprints!)

• Scrum mastering project platform udpates and management, and stand up meetings management as needed.

LEADERSHIP

• Suggest, present, demonstrate, and persuade with extensive evidence, all stakeholders to unanimously, and eventually excitedly, adopt dramatically paradigm-shifting approaches to addressing unmet client/user needs.

• Encourage and inspire others through example, work ethics, communicating clear vision, and verifying understanding of audience.

• Lead technical design sessions and development teams.

• Personally research, design, develop, and lead teams to deliver innovative solutions in support of business’ strategic and tactical objectives.

• Provide hands-on, expert-level technical assistance to developers.

ANALYSIS AND DESIGN

• Evaluating traffic patterns, studying user feedback, coordinating with usability team members.

• Envisioning, planning, and documenting technology architecture by studying the needs of the target audience aligned with the site goals, corporate strategy, opportunities, and constraints.

• Translate business requirements into well-architected solutions.

• Identity problem areas and overhaul development and operations methodologies to increase efficacy.

• Architect and document technical solutions that are aligned with client business objectives.

• Create, and extensively diagram and document, user flow scenarios including many use-case scenarios as well as larger information structure, data flow, consumer journey workflow, and navigation experiences.

• Producing workflow diagrams, user scenarios, flowcharts, and storyboards and from those creating page layouts, navigation rules, organization of information, and site maps.

• Validating information delivery including through results of usability test plans.

HANDS-ON and R&D

• R&D, design, setup, administration, auditing, load-testing and performance tuning many diverse technologies.

• Extensive hands-on research and development implementation of products, evaluating sometimes hundreds of products across hundreds of variables to find exactly the right fit for a specific business requirement.

• Design, build, and extensively document infrastructure and code from ground-up and hand off to others to maintain and grow.

• Perform periodic security and/or code reviews to ensure compliance to standards.

• Secured, enhanced, and and made scalable, Jitsi-based large-scale video conferencing, real-time recording and broadcasting, real-time closed captions, and offline transcriptions.

• Jitsi Meet Server (JMS), Jitsi Videobridge (JVB), Prosody, Jicofo, Jibri, Jigasi, Octo, HA Proxy, etc.

• Build entire DEVSBX, RND, DEV, TST, QA1, DMO, LOD, UAT, QA2, STG, and PRD environments from scratch.

• Build entire Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure from the ground-up.

• Build entire on-prem infrastructure from the ground-up.

• Automated speech recognition (ASR) and various neural networks R&D

• Real-time closed captioning and custom profanity and keyword filtering (self-implemented not using public services)

• Vosk, wav2letter, Flashlight-ASR,

• Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) R&D

• Bot artificial intelligence (AI) R&D

• Offline AV language translation

• Natural language (NL) and accessible human readable, .srt., and .vtt AV to text transcripts.

• Accessible AV playback for various population needs through integration with Able Player

• Real-time, offline, synchronous, and asynchronous online learning

• [matrix] protocol implementation with Synapse Home Server, Element matrix client, custom-built, and other matrix clients, application integration management server, identity management server, bots, and other infrastructure relevant to the ecosystem

• Software, product, and infrastructure as a service development, management, and delivery (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS)

• Microservices research, development, implementation, and management

• Docker, containerd, Kubernetes, Selenium, AWS autoscaling, etc.

• Java and Python server applications

• Full-stack development

• JavaScript, React, NodeJS, Typescript, HTML, CSS, json, etc.

• Daily work with Git, Bitbucket, Github, and Gitlabs

• Go, Python, Java, C, C++, C#, .Net, and various shell scripting

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) SysOps, DevOps, EC2, CloudWatch, ECS, advanced networking, & more

• Extensive Ansible and Terraform infrastructure coding development and automation

• MS SQL, Postgresql, MongoDB, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, NoSQL, and FireBase

• Nginx, Apache, and IIS

• Extensive heavy daily use of Jibri, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Gitlabs.

• Online Learning Management Systems (LMS), custom-built proprietary systems, as well as opensource systems such as Moodle, open edX, and others.

I was asked to join LearningMate to help save a specific critical project that was attempting to develop a complete Zoom and online learning replacement using customized opensource-based real-time communications media, conferencing, and learning technologies whose implementation was in jeopardy.

Specifically hired due to my extensive background with relevant enterprise and global-scale high capacity implementation of opensource and commercial technologies in video-conferencing, media streaming, education, online learning, community building, distributed synchronous and asynchronous communications and learning. 

The previous project was also very sparse in planning and documentation. The revised project was much more extensively designed, tested, and documented, making sustainability much more manageable for future teams.

Some technologies and proprietary information are currently under NDA. The technologies listed here are the open source products introduced to avoid having to “reinvent the wheel” and focus instead of the specific areas distinctive to LearningMate’s solutions. Also worked on overhauling existing dysfunctional project design, management, development, staging, testing, and production roll-out methodologies.