Michael Chase

East Bay, CA ~ Email ~ LinkedIn ~ GitHub | v09.17
pdf | bio | experiences

Motivation

Building software is an art form. There is (almost) no greater joy than coming together with the best engineers in the best working conditions to make great software and solve some tough challenges along the way. Like most artwork, you may have an idea of what you want to create going in, but what you come out with will surprise you when you put your heart into it.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer | Ancestry | Aug 2015 - Present | San Francisco, CA

Starting out as a Software Engineer, I contributed to a team tasked with improving and maintaining the E-Commerce front-end website. We iterated on the Python Tornado server that helped us scale, as well as the Angular code providing the UX. As a Senior Software Engineer, I helped drive the development of a full stack survey application backed by MySQL, NodeJS, Memcached, and React.

Technologies - Python, NodeJS, MySQL, Memcached, Docker + Kubernetes, React, Angular 1 + 2, Terraform, AWS (ECS, EC2, KMS, and more).

• Extended functionality on a C# stack serving as a proxy to allow new order types.
• Stitched together Pika, Celery (RabbitMQ), and defunct library tornado-celery to implement async celery <==> Tornado interactions.
• Designed and implemented localized MySQL question content system with versioning.
• Used Terraform to ship HIPAA compliant AWS ECS deployment.
• Utilized Jenkins for all code deployments.
• Added a custom client-side utility that enabled calling React-Redux actions which streamlined testing.

Our v1 product, Query, allowed users to share data about themselves in a controlled way. As 1 of the founding engineers, my responsibilities led me to architect and help implement a React-Native app and Python api that allows users to manage who had access to their data. Our v2 product, Sequel, aims to promote a more meaningful way of sharing ideas.

Technologies - Python, Redis, Heroku, MongoDB, React-Native, React

• Built a Python Flask api/websocket server that could be easily scaled thanks to the power of Gevent and MongoDB.
• Built a distributed worker queue system into the api utilizing Redis-Queue and Gevent.
• Built a React-Native IOS app that took full advantage of ES6, Flux patterns, and websockets to facilitate user features.
• Implemented location tracking with the ability to share to other users.
• Implemented Google Calendar integration to allow users to share their availability.

Jumped in on day 1 learning everything I could about Python flask webservers to help rewrite the core api. Two months later became the lead API engineer as well as the goto guy for all things engineering contributing to things like Google Closure based web apps, Analytics/Experiments done in PlanOut and AWS RedShift and the Hadoop logging infrastructure.

Technologies - Python, Redis, Heroku, MongoDB, Google Closure, AWS (SNS, Route53, S3, and more).

• Built a distributed priority worker queue system into the api utilizing Redis-Queue and Gevent.
• Utilized PlanOut to add simple A/B tests through the api for feature flagging in the IOS app.
• Re-wrote API dashboard in Google Closure.
• Created Heroku buildpack for twemproxy
• Implemented Python unicode parser to properly show Emoji’s in Push Notifications and remove them where necessary.

Dove into the deep end head first without a life jacket to become a React expert and help deliver features at Apple

Technologies - NodeJS, React

• Implemented data heavy dashboards using D3 and React.
• Created an expandable data table using React and Flux.
• Developed a documentation generator for React using Gulp.

Education:

Bachelor of Science Computer Science
Norfolk State University, Norfolk, VA | 2008 - 2012 GPA 3.77/4.0