AJ Danelz

Linktr.ee

Software Engineer and Advocate

I am a full-stack engineer, and developer advocate passionate about distributed cloud application design and implementation. I accomplish this through diligent design and programming, with a strong focus on DevOps and orchestration. I will contribute to the success of a software project by being a strong proponent of these ideals, advocating internally and externally for the developer community.

Experiences

Head of Developer Experience

Mar 2023 - Present

Aklivity

Aklivity is a startup and small team, and I served in a leadership role on a team of one. I have created the onboarding and overall developer experience for the Zilla project, which meant a completely new documentation site and Demos repository. I created or updated all of the demos and examples to be runnable by a single command. I improved the quickstart and managed the live service that new users interact with. I published community updates, feature annoucements, and demo walkthroughs. I managed the community feedback, being the first line of communication and troubleshooting. I built all of the demos for conferences and worked the booth.

Awesome List maintainer

nov 2023 - Present

awesome-data-engineering

I took over as the primary maintainer to keep this list up to date.

Head of Developer Relations

Jan 2022 - Mar 2023

WSO2

I lead the team that builds and fosters the community of developers around the Open Source and SAAS projects at WSO2 along with the Ballerina programming language (ballerina.io). Additionally, I led the technical writers who worked on each product documentation site and the company training material, leading them to improve the developer experience for both. I led the team in putting on a global hackathon. I was a speaker at and worked the conference booth for multiple large and small events.

Lead Solutions Engineer

Feb 2021 - Jan 2022

WSO2

I was a technical sales engineer who helped customers solve problems with WSO2 products. I brokered the deal for the first customer on the Asgardeo SaaS platform. Wrote an opinion piece on auth and tech debt.

Sr. Full Stack Developer

Feb 2020 - Feb 2021

BMW: Apps and Services

I was a senior member of the team building a service that provided electric car drivers with optimized charging for their vehicles called bmwchargeforward.com. This app connected many internal BMW systems but interfaced with power companies to provide up-to-date energy data. In addition, I coordinated with top vehicle manufacturers and utility companies to build a system to securely send electrical grid data from the utility companies to each electric car manufacturer.

Sr. Enterprise Application Engineer

2018 - Feb 2020

AFS Logistics

I worked as a lead engineer on a team building a new Transportation Management System from the ground up using a microservice architecture. Spring Boot, gRPC, Protobuf, Kafka, Elastic Search, Vue.js, PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm.

Full Stack Mentor

2018 - 2020

Thinkful Inc

I worked one-on-one with students participating in the program. My main goal was to help overcome hurdles and provide more depth to the program where needed.

Enterprise Application Engineer

2012 - 2018

Transplace

I maintained legacy applications, worked on improvements and new features of existing products, and architected new applications.

Projects

BMW Charge Forward

Project Homepage

This project includes a collection of BMW internal services providing vehicle data sources. They are used to optimize electric vehicles charging times. To manage the streams of vehicle event data, AWS Lambda, SQS, and Kinesis were built together in a Typescript mono repo. The backend was built with node Nest.js framework and PostgreSQL.

Transportation Management System

AFS company site

This project includes a collection of applications and microservices deployed with Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm. Projects I participated in A Rating System designed for high throughput and consists of multiple microservices using Spring Boot, Golang, Protobuf, gRPC, Redis, PostgreSQL, and Vue. A Document Manager built to control the ingestion of physical documents using Spring Boot, Protobuf, gRPC, WebSockets, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Google Cloud API, and Vue. A Delayed Messaged Delivery service that can scale for high volume built with Kafka, Redis, and Spring Boot.

BallerinaLang Exercism.io

Exercism Track

I updated the code execution and testing environments and improved the base set of courses. I also added an additional set of new courses that featured the language’s recent features.

Gohlay

Project repo

I wrote an open-source WIP tool to reproduce the Kafka delayed/scheduled message system using Golang Gohlay WIP. It has a much smaller footprint and can scale more efficiently without the dependency on Redis.

Dynamic EDI parser

Transplace => UberFreight

This reliable EDI parser is able to convert any EDI file into an object format of choice (XML, JSON, etc.). I developed the algorithm that utilized specific Java class definitions to know how to parse any type of EDI file. This gave us the power to define broad or specific rules in each Java class file that would teach the algorithm how to read any EDI file. The classes could then be extended to build custom file parsers. Transpace was bought by UberFreight.

Skills

Tech	Proficiency
Golang
Java, Spring Boot
Front End, Vue, React
Kafka, Event Driven
Git, Devops, CI/CD
Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
gRPC, Protobuf
PostgreSQL, Grafana, Elastic Search

Education

B.S. in Computer Science Cum Laude

Southern Wesleyan University

Anecdotes

• Eagle Scout with the Silver Palm
• Orchestrated and participated in many leadership programs and service projects
• Research article: Path Planning using Dijkstra and Lightning Enhancement

Hobbies

• Hiking
• Scuba
• Traveling
• Mixology
• Disc Golf
• 3D Printing