Michael Christenson II

As a co-founder of RebelHold, I mentor talent, find clients, run story boarding, negotiate contracts, and take care of the accounting and billing. I have been building a programmers' cooperative with my fellow programmers from around the US; working with cutting edge tech like Rails 4.x, NodeJs, Golang, Elixir, C#, IoT, and Couchbase.

I worked at an internal stealth startup, Leaf. The goals of the project was to enable farmers to have more efficient operations, improving visibility and understanding through IoT data collection and predictive analytics. As the Senior Lead Developer in the Phoenix division, I was entrusted with the Front End Architecture, team development, and Mobile/IoT Guidance. I was also the Lead Engineer for the data analytics UX design.

My main responsibilities involve research and development of technologies for our roadmap, Android, Ruby, and AngularJs development, as well server operations.

As a Senior Developer, Director of UI/UX of the Web Services, and all around good guy, I took the lead for many endeavors in RevSpring. I tackled a lot of challenges; from implementing documentation, paired programming, and testing, to mentoring junior developers, implementing sane deploy processes, and changing the face of RevSpring to their clients and users.

Using Ruby on Rails, I helped Wexford Jewelers redefine itself quite literally.

Gone are the days of paper transactions, guessing the taxable amount of your inventory by guessing the weight, and not having any web presence at all.

Now Wexford Jewelers is considered one of the better jewelry stores in Northern Michigan and is on its way to recognition globally. With sales online to as far away as Australia, and in to the fashion district of Paris, it won't be long.

Using mainly Ruby on Rails, I worked on many projects for Integrum. Some of the projects he has worked on include a site to bid on foreclosures, an extensible CMS, idea bidding, and metro routing.

I was invited to work on TWB as a transition consultant. My task was to help migrate the current code from their previous hosting environment to a new one, to help debug some of the issues they had with the code, to help train a team of Java developers in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and to make sure that the team could take over the project once the transition was done.

I ended up spending a little over a month in training, setting up EC2 instances, and helping port certain parts of the code base over to newer technologies. The code base started as a LuvdByLess and educommons fork. Almost every portion of the LuvdByLess side was been replaced with new code and moved in to a project called luvfoo. That project is now opensourced.

I really liked the open source nature of this project. It's every geeks dream to be paid to work on Open Source projects, and it's always one that I pursue as often as possible.

Truelobby was created as the new way to communicate with your state and federal representatives. It brings modern communication to congressional houses, and allow a very personal touch to things that effect our lives daily.

I was brought in to this project after most of the design for the site was done. The site is being tested in the State of Washington and had a hard deadline in mid January; to be built, tested, run through a beta, and launched into production. I was brought on mid December and recommended a crew of four individuals, including myself, two of which I hand picked, and the other whom had applied for the position I had at the same time (I was made the secondary Lead Developer as a time zone overlap).

My job was to take over from an initial bort setup, build a team, set project requirements, guide the team, and code myself. The crew used several plugins and I ended up committing changes to those repositories to fix issues that they ran in to as they were going along.

They had a near flawless launch with only two minor Internet Explorer ajax bugs (which got fixed very shortly after). They had over a thousand customers sign up on day one as well as the full support of the Legislators from the State of Washington. It was an exhilarating experience.

My position was that of the Senior Lead Programmer. As the Senior Lead Programmer it was my job to build a team under me, decide on code structure, set up servers, repositories, etc., manage business relationships, and code. I often coordinated with the CEO and the founders to help make decisions effecting their business model and the longevity and welfare of the network.

My main task with Less Everything was to build a java client to help customers of a photo site they were building upload images, tag them, and manage licenses for them. I used JRuby and Swing to accomplish the majority of the work. I used Merb for the back end and created an Air front end for the client as well.

My tasks included building the various Project Management paper shufflings such as Functional Requirements, the Business Requirements, and the Wireframes; Provide a program flowchart based on that knowledge; Provide Milestones and a general Timeline for the project; Provide technical support and guidance in regards to the technology used, code standards, and hourly quotes per ticket.

I also got to do a lot of heavy coding on the interface side of flash. Endemol was a main client of Futurecorp's.

One of my favorite projects was building the attwilliams site. There were a lot of physics and other dynamic interactions happening on the front, with the data being fed through a custom made class that read the rss feed from other parts of the non-public facing site.

I lead three crews across five time zones for this project; coding Ruby on Rails with the backend coders, flash with the interface coders, and html/css/javascript with the client coders.

I also worked with the client on getting the staging servers up and helping launch the data through development, test, staging, and finally the production server.

My role, as a Web Application Developer, was to have worked on 2co's shopping cart interface and architecture. The overarching goal was to kill their old shopping cart service solution, and create a new shopping cart solution as a service to their clients.

They experimented using Ruby on Rails but there were too many knowledgeable Perl developers not willing to make the switch. In the end my team went with an MVC framework that was close to Ruby on Rails but written in Perl.

Resource Interactive is an incredibly innovative company. Everyday was challenging.

This was the early days for Ruby on Rails. It was still untested and Lime was the largest site to date run off of it. The OpenID server was to be next.

Feel free to read my boring tasks below ...

Performed UNIX administration by remote setup a 5-system cluster for full database redundancy and load balancing; Helped develop the feel of the site integrating polls, comments, and basic site flow; Helped develop full site analytics so that the client could view them via the web or an excel spreadsheet; Helped increase social (user) interaction through several relative content/comment linking, and user profile linking; Helped client clarify site specifications and streamlined revisions; Integrated full bug tracking; Helped create AJAX commenting system; Used UML to model the database layout so the project could be properly parted and the various elements of the site could be shared.

Element v2 and v3: Worked with a Creative Director on the design of the User Interface. The design became the branding of all of their advertising material; Built the entire site using MACROMEDIA FLASH using scripting for all animations, layout, and backend communications for content; Helped improve the companies rank in search engines by providing them with a unique SEO product - the first of its kind for MACROMEDIA FLASH solving a long time problem of making FLASH sites searchable.