Marcus Welz

Designing and architecting online event registration system to meet the needs of road and obstacle course race events. Support for multiple courses, wave times, registration tiers, discount codes, Groupon and Living Social. E-commerce and customer support solution integration. Providing web development, social media integration, marketing, and customer care services to clientele. Lead the development effort to establish brand and brand identity for Legend Race. Providing photography and video services to clientele.

Developed with and communicated to the team the overall application architecture and deployment strategy, through diagrams and “lunch and learn” meetings. Gave presentations on PHPUnit, Codeception, queuing mechanism and event driven development. Designed scalable applications starting with wireframes in Balsamiq Mockups, worked with the UX designers to optimize the user experience, designed the system architecture in draw.io, developed applications using IntelliJ / PHPStorm and Vagrant (later Docker), deployed applications taking full advantage of AWS as IaaS, including EC2, S3, RDS, SQS, Elastic Search, and Elastic Beanstalk, to auto-scale with visitor traffic as well as parallelize data processing; Architected and lead team efforts to implement a “bulk uploader” ETL application to allow customers to import product listing spreadsheets of practically unlimited size. Used Slim framework, Doctrine 2 ORM, AWS Elastic Beanstalk for web server and worker instances. Architected and developed the eBay Sync micro service to connect eBay stores to the Stanley Gibbons Marketplace and manage the flow of product updates and sales. Optimized Magento for cloud deployment using Docker containers and Elastic Beanstalk, integrating support for MongoDB as product store, and using AWS Elastic Search for fast product searching.

Managed and provided technical leadership to the software engineering staff. Defined roles and responsibilities to provide career paths to the team members. Provided architectural leadership and worked with product management to determine technical feasibility. Coordinated development efforts using agile methodologies (scrum).

Managed and provided architectural direction to the software engineering team. Worked with the product management team to determine the technology needs and approach. Continued interviewing candidates to build out the technical team, including back-end, front-end, DevOps and QA engineers.

Migrated bidstart.com post-acquisition from bare metal single-server hardware onto virtualized infrastructure with fail-over capabilities on Amazon Web Services. Set the coding standards, selected technology platform and direction for new software engineering efforts to use proper software engineering principles and modern web application architecture. Interviewed lots of candidates to build out the technical team.

Took initiative to introduce and implement Twitter Bootstrap to take advantage of responsive design patterns and remove the need to maintain a separate mobile website. Architected and managed the development team for a mobile web application. Lead developer for the internal CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and IRT (Inventory Resource Tool) applications. Introduced JQuery and JQueryUI to replace the existing ExtJS and YUI JavaScript Frameworks, reducing code complexity, fewer client-side includes, faster rendering times and less maintenance overhead. Introduced the team to and standardized new PHP development on Zend Framework (and its coding standards) for more consistent applications in terms of architecture, design, and testing procedures. Introduced and implemented Phing, a PHP tool similar to Apache Ant, to automate software rollouts, including automated database migrations and rollbacks using DBDeploy. Gave a presentation on Subversion, took initiative and successfully executed the migration of the 18,000+ revision CVS repository to SVN. Drafted the company policy on version control and guidelines with regards to branching and tagging. Developed a comprehensive Zend Framework-based client library to abstract and simplify interfacing with internal JBoss SOAP Web Services with the ability to serialize and handle large nested object graphs. Introduced JSON-RPC as a light-weight alternative to SOAP. Mentored developers on design patterns, Zend Framework best practices, and web application security.

Lead design and development efforts of a scalable video management system and integration with the advection.net CDN using PHP, Zend Framework, and JQuery. Developed ExpressionEngine modules and extensions for the hyper-local social media site MyNC.com. Mentored developers on design patterns, scalable application architecture, and Zend Framework.

Joined ESC along with the acquisition of slbuzz.com, a social media site developed for Second Life. Lead developer responsible for the architecture of shop.onrez.com (a site later acquired by Linden Lab and integrated into the official Second Life Marketplace). Designed and implemented RESTful SOA components to enable seamless integration with the "Second Life" virtual world for messaging, entity tracking, payment processing and currency exchange including PayPal integration, and virtual product delivery using PHP and Zend Framework. Prototyped virtual world visitor metrics application and C#/Mono libsecondlife-based bots for a virtual world search engine product. developed automated image upload service using PHP and C#.

Developed comprehensive PHP based reporting system to allow customers to generate flexible, complex ad-hoc reports. Duties included business analysis, application design and database architecture according to customer specifications. Introduced the development team to agile development methodologies, object oriented programming concepts and test-driven development with Zend Framework, Zend Studio, best practices for web applications with regards to application security, stability, and scalability. Laid the groundwork for separation of business and presentation logic in order to reduce turnaround time for new feature development and to simplify application maintenance. Lead software stack migration efforts of MySQL 4 to MySQL 5, and PHP 4 to PHP5,

Designed and developed a web-based workflow and business process management application using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software stack using AJAX and MVC. The base product was enhanced and customized according to customer specifications Responsibilities span the entire product lifecycle, from initial analysis to final deployment, Product specifications, front-end development, database architecture, server administration, marketing, sales, and client care. International clientele includes companies in North America, Europe and Australia, such as American Pacific Financial Corporation, Digitalhost.net, Expedia, HomeYeah.com, Nielsen Business GmbH, and Winecellarage.com.

Coordinated the efforts of eight software engineers to develop a REO workflow management application for the real estate industry. Took on lead design role, responsible for business analysis, application design and database architecture. Used ASP and SQL Server to develop key components according specifications in an agile development environment.

Maintained the door configuration system for the rolling doors division, written in Turbo Pascal 3 and 6, aided migration of business logic to a Progress database.

Provided desktop application and web development services to Intersoft clients using Delphi, Visual Basic, ASP, and SQL Server. Lead developer for an ASP model web services product using SQL Server 2000, Delphi 6 and SOAP. Developed website Access Ventures for Venture Capital firm using ASP, SQL Server 2000. Provided development services to Envision Software as member of rapid prototyping team using Visual Basic 6, SQL, and MTS to build a COM based module for a mobile service management system. Created a secure extranet "Disease Reporting" application for the Ohio Board of Health using ASP, SQL Server 2000, and JavaScript. Updated and maintained product and company websites, developed interactive product demo, and created the bi-weekly promotional newsletter for Plansoft Corporation using Visual Interdev, and Photoshop. Member of the development team creating a Medical Staff Management System application using ASP, JavaScript and SQL Server 2000.