After a brief spirit journey, I started doing some R&D consulting for special projects at Ai. My early focus was with working with the team on the Unified Landing Page (ULP) product designing and implementing the identity access and management (ULP IAM) module. This module allows the product to support single-sign on from various external identity providers to the ULP portal and federate those authentication and authorization sessions to downstream applications, or service providers, through a mechanism called identity provider chaining, using AuthN/AuthZ standards such as SAML 1.0 and 2.0, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect.

From this R&D work, the leadership team at Ai worked to build me a new role within the organization in which I could focus on strategic initiatives (such as our cloud adoption strategy), lead our enterprise architecture, design and develop new R&D initiatives to determine market viability, and operate in a developer advocate role as a coach and mentor to our growing engineering team to help them adopt containerization, CI/CD processes, and cloud-native architectures.

In mid-2018, there was a need for me to move back into an interim role, where I directly managed the engineering team again, and actively played a solution architect/scrum master role for one of our development teams to establish CI/CD workflows and pipelines for our products and help get through some critical delivery milestones. I moved back to my chief architect/developer advocate role in June of 2019.

I served a leadership role in the company as well as a solutions architect. While I was in this role at Ai, I've helped to make some positive change in the company. We doubled our staff from just under 30 employees to over 60 in my first 18 months. I was part of a three person team that devised a new software engineering process (based on Scrum) that has been appraised at CMMI level 3, and we also successfully migrated all of our development projects to this process. I also serve as the technical architect overseeing some of our CRISP engineering projects (e.g. the CRISP Reporting System and a state-wide provider directory) and our entire federal engineering project portfolio. I still found some time to write some software for Ai, as well - I have developed the majority of the Standards Testing and Implementation Environment, and I'm responsible for UX design and Section 508 compliance. Fortunately, all of my development work for our federal contracts is released as open source, most of which can be found on GitHub.

While at GeoDecisions, I managed and led the development team in their transportation division, and I served as a technical architect for all of my team's projects. Our development team primarily focused on web and mobile spatially enabled software products for various state transportation departments, including both spatial and logistics based applications. I also had an opportunity to work independently on some of software products; I designed and developed a straight-line diagramming product and a turn-by-turn bicycle-routing product for NYC (prior to google maps implementing bicycle routes).

I was recruited to TransCore by one of my previous managers. While at TransCore, I led a development team through re-architecting and productizing their lane controller software (for both electronic and conventional toll lanes) and the real-time data aggregation services that were used in their toll-plaza and toll-host software. I had the opportunity to travel the world while implementing my electronic tolling systems at their various clients. I served as a technical architect designing software solutions, while contributing to their business development process, and I had the unique opportunity to flex my hardware design muscles by designing their lane controller and transponder dispensing kiosk hardware. I also took on the design and development of various pet projects during my limited bench time between contracts (e.g. violation imaging and OCR software, video auditing software, and various kiosks). Finally, I had an opportunity to teach other developers (both internal and external to TransCore); I ran training sessions on real-time and embedded software development techniques.