Resume

Senior Drupal and PHP engineer with 10+ years building and maintaining CMS-based websites and web applications for education, health content, nonprofit, and civic organizations. Lead developer on guest checkout for becker.com, with deep experience in Salesforce and payment integrations, platform security, SEO structured data, and automated testing. Daily practitioner of AI-assisted development, and an independent consultant since 2016 who turns stakeholder goals into practical technical plans.

Employment Experience

  • Software Engineer – Becker Professional Education – August 2021 - Present
    • Essential contributor on a small, collaborative Drupal team that architects and maintains the enterprise Drupal 10 platform behind becker.com, serving hundreds of thousands of learners, with integrations across Salesforce B2B Commerce, payment processing, SSO, LMS APIs, and AWS.
    • Served as lead developer on the guest checkout initiative, which shipped ahead of its revised target date and contributed to a substantial increase in first-time sales.
    • Overhauled schema.org structured data across product and landing pages in partnership with the SEO team.
    • Built a Google Merchant Center product feed and admin controls that enabled Google Shopping campaigns.
    • Kept a revenue-critical commerce site current on critical Drupal core and contributed-module security advisories, with no disruption to customers or payment processing.
    • Played a key role in Salesforce–Drupal re-platforming, retiring Salesforce Communities and moving learner-facing functionality to Drupal.
    • Diagnosed production performance and data issues, including database slowdowns, duplicate carts, price-cache leaks, and PHP worker saturation.
    • Added 700+ automated tests in 2026, up from fewer than 30 in the prior three years combined, while handling about 3× more code and tests per ticket, using an AI-assisted plan, build, review, and test workflow with characterization tests written before changes to legacy code.
    • Contributed to team-wide AI coding guidance and reusable agent skills, and shared responsibility for Change Advisory Board submissions for a combined e-commerce and CRM team.
  • Owner, Developer, and Consultant – Exel Digital, LLC – Flossmoor, IL – Jan. 2016 - Present
    • Founded and continue to operate an independent web development and consulting practice serving small business, nonprofit, and civic clients.
    • Clients have included Union Web Services (data management consulting for a large union operations organization), a nonprofit Drupal e-commerce site, and the Daniel Biss Illinois gubernatorial campaign WordPress site.
    • Manage hosting across DigitalOcean, AWS, Platform.sh, and Pantheon, and deliver development, security maintenance, and technical support across Drupal, WordPress, and CiviCRM.
  • Drupal Developer – Veritas Health – Deerfield, IL – July 2017 - May 2021
    • Maintained five revenue-critical Drupal 7 sites serving millions of monthly visitors, including Spine-health.com, with a focus on uptime, performance, and a consistent user experience.
    • Built a comprehensive Behat test suite from scratch and defined the team's testing approach, improving code reliability and deployment confidence.
    • Played a key role in a Drupal 7-to-8 migration, developing custom modules and restructuring large content datasets.
    • Provisioned, tuned, and managed Ubuntu, Nginx, and MariaDB infrastructure with SaltStack across a portfolio of high-traffic sites.
  • Support Developer – Promet Source – Chicago, IL – May 2016 - June 2017
    • Served as support developer, security maintainer, and project estimator across Drupal 6-8 sites.
    • Maintained Docker and Vagrant local environments, and wrote JIRA and Confluence documentation that improved knowledge sharing across the team.
    • Administered a variety of cloud-based Apache and Nginx web servers for sites of all sizes.
  • Junior Developer and Technical Analyst – Digital Bridge Solutions – Chicago, IL – July 2014 - Dec. 2015
    • Back-end developer for Drupal e-commerce sites
    • Security maintainer and enhancements engineer for numerous Drupal and Magento sites
    • DevOps engineer for improved development team efficiency
  • Structural Engineer – GRAEF – Chicago, IL – June 2007 - April 2014
    • Developed a Tollway Plaza Database – An interactive Microsoft Access database cataloguing plaza details, enhanced with Visual Basic for easy data search, input, and manipulation.
      • Implemented such features as automated report generation with linked photo thumbnails, OLE embedded & linked files, and an easy-to-navigate menu system.
      • Created numerous queries and tables to analyze pavement condition and lane statistics.
    • Developed a Lake County Roadway Drainage Structure Assessments Database – A database cataloguing field observations and measurements for the repair/improvement of drainage structures in Lake County.
      • Constructed a database to store photos, field observations and measurements.
      • Leveraged data to generate repair and improvement recommendations for use in schedules and contract plans.
      • Prepared a photo log of each location for use by the Resident Engineer to help define the improvements.
    • Served as Information Systems emergency technician for O’Hare office.
      • Replaced computer components such as hard drives, memory, and power supplies.
      • Assisted co-workers with productivity & engineering software applications.
  • Computer Services Assistant – Caldyne, Inc. – Elmhurst, IL – June 2000 - Aug. 2006
    • Designed and maintained a web site for Community Care Options (now Pillars), a large multi-city public healthcare organization.
    • Maintained a Windows NT-based computer network essential to C.C.O. operations.
    • Trained social workers on the use and maintenance of spreadsheets & databases.
    • Consulted on computer-related issues with The Architectural Partnership in Chicago.
  • Scoreboard Operations Crew – Chicago White Sox – Chicago, IL May 1999 - Oct. 2011
    • In-House Audio/Visual Media Productions – Provided 13 seasons of loyal, productive expertise in a live, high-pressure environment as a producer, operator, and logger.
      • Training with tape decks, A/V computer media systems, and logging systems.
      • Logged live events for Major League Baseball highlight reels.
      • Queued and rolled animations for presentation on the Jumbotron Scoreboard in center field.
  • Undergraduate Research Assistant for Professors Hajjar, Paulino, and Dodds – Urbana, IL Mar. 2004 - Oct. 2006
    • Researched and summarized EERI earthquake scenarios.
    • Ran Level 1 HAZUS Earthquake Loss Assessment scenarios.
    • Developed a MAEViz Earthquake Loss Assessment software validation plan.
    • Assisted in the publication of the textbook: Boundary Element Method.
    • Modified MATLAB GUI interface code.
    • Created textbook graphical figures with xFig software.
    • Designed a C++ application for building Fortran makefiles.

Technical Skills

  • Expert: PHP 7+, Drupal (6–11), MySQL, REST APIs, Composer, Git/Gitflow, Bash, Linux, PHPUnit, Behat
  • Proficient: JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3/SASS, Bootstrap, schema.org structured data, Symfony 5+, Docker, third-party integrations (Salesforce, SSO, LMS APIs), payment/checkout processing (CyberSource), AWS
  • Familiar: WordPress, CiviCRM, Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Magento, Python, Java, C++
  • AI-assisted development: Claude Code (primary) and GitHub Copilot; multi-agent orchestration, with a lead agent coordinating parallel sub-agents, across planning, implementation, test authoring, and code review
  • Tools and process: JIRA, Confluence, Agile/Scrum, CI/CD (Travis CI, AWS CodeBuild), Change Advisory Board process, Google Merchant Center, Acquia Cloud, Pantheon, Platform.sh, Lando

Education

Professional Certifications & Activities

Acquia Certified Site Builder