Resume of James Williams

James is a software architect and senior developer in Charleston, SC. He has eighteen years of experience designing, building, and supporting an automated service delivery and cloud provisioning system for hundreds of microservice deployments in Azure and, before that, an enterprise-scale CRM and transaction system on a .NET and Microsoft SQL Server tech stack

He is interested in building new products on up-and-coming technologies, modernizing older systems to take advantage of recent advances, exploring the future of cloud deployments, and solving interesting problems alongside a passionate team

DevOps — Kubernetes, Istio, Docker, Azure PaaS, Azure DevOps Pipelines, PowerShell & bash
.NET — C#, F#, ASP.Net Core WebAPI, distributed and parallel programming
Web — Typescript & JavaScript
Databases — SQL Server, Azure CosmosDB, performance design, query optimization

Technical lead and architect of the Platform Engineering team charged with enabling and empowering other dev teams to quickly and efficiently leverage Azure's PaaS deployment options

Currently designing and implementing a PCI DSS-Compliant IaC-based compute platform for continuously deployed microservices, centered around Kubernetes

Currently leading an effort to migrate existing microservice-based deployment automation to a new IaC model based on Pulumi

Designed and implemented a DDoS protection solution for Kubernetes deployments in Azure

Assisted with the design and led the implementation of a transition from company-wide Azure App Service deployments to Kubernetes-based deployments using Azure AKS

On-call and subject matter expert for Kubernetes implementation and operational issues

Architectural consultant and subject matter expert for any team wanting to go forward with new Azure technologies

My current team was chartered to create a new system for deploying and maintaining the infrastructure for all of Blackbaud's next-gen products and capabilities.

On this team, I focus on combining Azure's PaaS building blocks with our own internal automation to allow other dev teams to quickly and easily deploy new microservices to production with all of the obvious NFRs around availability, monitoring, security, and compliance.

As the industry evolves, we've been adapting our own approaches to make best use of the technologies available. I'm currently in the process of designing an approach to move our current Azure resource deployment automation to an IaC approach based on Pulumi and Azure Pipelines. I've previously assisted in architecting and implementing a shift in our compute platform from Azure App Services web apps to a Kubernetes platform based on Azure's AKS.

While it's a good thing to take advantage of new technical opportunities, these shifts cannot be allowed to impact the productivity of other developers who depend on the platform my team provides. We therefore take care to ensure that migrations are largely painless and require minimal or no effort from our consuming teams. This is done via base libraries we maintain along with carefully-planned testing and automated migration steps to minimize impact.

With our highly-standardized implementations, my small team is able to provide on-call support for all infrastructure issues any of our services encounter. During these incidents, I jump from technical troubleshooting and repair activities, coordination between various internal groups, and liaising with Azure support personnel.

Even aside from on-call support, I also spend a large amount of time working with developers across the company to understand their needs, help them solve their problems more effectively with Azure and the platform we've built, understand ways that our platform should evolve to support them better, and provide troubleshooting and operational guidance throughout the day. Working with internal customers means that I know my users and can be responsive to their needs.

Technical lead on the team charged with building and maintaining the framework and platform for an enterprise CRM solution

Maintained a powerful ad-hoc query engine, implementing multiple performance improvements and feature enhancements along the way

Added dozens of features and resolved hundreds of bugs in legacy areas of the system

Modernized legacy subsystems by adopting new authentication methods and new .NET async patterns

Previously, as the team lead for the Enterprise Platform Team I focused on the foundational platform for Blackbaud's Enterprise CRM product. I was the front line for my team when dealing with thorny production issues that ranged from helping our hosting services team diagnose environmental problems to providing developer support for customer-written customizations on top of our platform.

In this role, I worked closely with our product support and product management teams to ensure that I was always providing a customer-focused solution whether I was fixing bugs across multiple product versions or recommending configuration changes to internal customer environments.

A subject-centered microblogging platform and personal website written in F# using a Mongo datastore, deployed via Docker

This resume, also written in F# as a specific page of the above personal website

A suite of Docker containers (and orchestration scripts) hosting multiple websites behind a Traefik frontend, deployed automatically via GitHub action pipelines

Other projects include:

a Windows UWP C# app for managing a karaoke library and playing CD+G files
a Ruby and Sinatra web app for managing a book club
an Objective-C and Cocoa macOS app for generating secure & memorable passwords
a PHP webapp for displaying photographs
miscellaneous scripts and utilities as needed in bash, PowerShell, TypeScript, C#, F#, C++, etc.

BS in Computer Science, Cum Laude
Minor in Mathematics

A current and annotated version of this resume is available at https://jameswilliams.me/resume