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James Brooks

Full Stack Software Engineer

About Me

Professionally, I am a full stack software developer. Since 2015 I've worked on a Windows desktop application, firmware for embedded systems, and web applications both cloud-based and on-prem. My strongest language is Java, but I'm also quite comfortable in JavaScript and TypeScript. I've worked in Spring, Quarkus, Javalin, Node, and .NET; Angular, React, Bootstrap, and Gatsby; SQL Server, DB2, CosmosDB, DynamoDB, and Elasticsearch.

Outside of work, the vast majority of my time is spent with my wife and three sons. I have lots of interests, like 3D printing, hunting and fishing, Elder Scrolls games, politics, Dungeons & Dragons, science... honestly I find a great many things interesting. But what I am currently focused on is my Christian faith.

Latest Projects

United States Trustee Program - CAse Management System

GitHub repository

We are modernizing the case management system used by the United States Trustee Program in their oversight of bankruptcy cases across the majority of the country.

My team and I practice ensemble programming (a.k.a. mob programming), producing high-quality code in a collaborative fashion. In addition to keeping quality high, this also produces simpler, more minimal solutions to problems, with no knowledge silos.

Onnagath

Coming Soon - Onnagath will be a tool for game masters and world builders to generate populations for settlements in their setting.

Other Projects

Full Stack Development with Quarkus and React

I've had the opportunity to be the technical reviewer for a book about writing a full stack application with a React front-end and a Quarkus backend.

Full Stack Development with Quarkus and React at Packt

Work Experience

Senior Full Stack Developer - Flexion Inc. (2021 - Present)

Flexion is a Wisconsin-based software services company. Software agility is baked into the cake here and our customers reap the benefits of that focus.

Most work performed at Flexion is accomplished via pairing or mobbing. Notable individual contributions below are emphasized.

  • Practiced what we call Option Enabling Architecture which is built around the ideas presented in Clean Architecture for all systems
    • Delay decisions to the last responsible moment
    • Quickly replace any part of the system without causing rework in other areas
    • Practice optionality
  • U.S. Trustee Program case management system
  • U.S. Tax Court electronic filing and case management system
    • See my contributions on GitHub
    • React front-end with Node backend in AWS ecosystem
    • Implemented storage and retrieval of environment variables in AWS Secrets Manager to reduce errors in running scripts from developer machines
    • Improved automation of deployment which enabled developers to quickly deploy to experimental environments from local or upon pushing changes
  • Contributed to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Pricing as a Service, a modernization effort
    • Javalin service in AWS ecosystem
    • Processed batches of Medicare claims pricing requests numbering in the low millions within minutes each night
    • Implemented strategy pattern to eliminate the duplication of large sections of code
    • Implemented the import of over a million rows of text efficiently streamed to DynamoDB

Software Engineer III & Tech Lead - J.B. Hunt Inc. (2017 - 2021)

Across several roles and domains I performed both greenfield and brownfield work. I wrote several Java services in three different frameworks, major features in Angular applications, and served on an Enablement Team advising other domains.

  • Architected enterprise tasking system. Led a team of developers in the implementation. The system consisted of two separate subsystems and made use of AMQ, Quarkus microservices, Azure SQL and CosmosDB databases, and an Elasticsearch index
  • Presented talks on Intellectual Control and Refactoring at internal conferences
  • One of two engineers sent to O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference NY 2020
  • Developed enterprise tools and employee landing page
  • Designed enterprise-wide user preferences service written in Kotlin on the Javalin framework
    • This sparked interest in expanding the tech stack and working with a small group of engineers, we were able to get Quarkus added to the tech stack as an officially supported Java framework

Software Developer II - General Atomics - EMS (2016 - 2017)

Work here was performed on radiation monitoring systems. Most were embedded systems, both Intel and ARM chips.

An interesting bit of work was converting the firmware from an older system to a new chip. The firmware was implemented in SafeRTOS, with C and ARM assembly being converted from an older ARM instruction set.

Another product was a server-based management system written in C#. This system communicated with the embedded systems over a proprietary communications network.

  • Developed application and system software deployed in nuclear power plants
  • Created and maintained Software Requirements Specifications, Software Quality Assurance Plans, Software Configuration Management Plans, and Software Test Plans and related documents
  • Ensured compliance with Nuclear Regulatory Commission specifications and standards, IEEE Software Quality Standards, and customer requirements
  • Interpreted schematics and system blueprints to aid in software design decisions

Software Developer - Aerotek (supporting General Atomics) (2015 - 2016)

This work was performed under a contract. The product was a Windows desktop application written mostly in C# on the .NET framework. Some versions were WinForms, and some were WPF. Honestly I don't really remember much of this work.

At the end of my contract with this division of GA, I received an offer for permanent employment but accepted another offer from another division of GA (the one above).

  • Maintained a Windows desktop application deployed on USAF assets
  • Identified additional requirements by checking function against MIL-STD publications regarding standards in use by our application

My GitHub