About Me
Hi there! So far, I have spent the entirety of my career at FindLaw in Eagan, MN. I pride myself in producing quality, maintainable code. Like it or not, I've made a career out of upgrading and migrating legacy, enterprise code from archaic designs to modern tools, patterns, and infrastructures. I know first hand how painful and expensive dealing with poorly-designed and maintained code is, and it's my continuing mission to seek out strange new worlds ⓘThis is a bad Star Trek joke :) ─ I mean ugly code and bring it into the 21st century.
I am a passionate advocate of no-merge development environments. Feature branches and pull-requests are fine for maturing dev teams. But they are the achilles heel of a truly efficient and agile team. If you're forcing your devs to use feature branches and pull-requests, you are holding back your people. I have years of experience with releasing proper CI/CD, "build-once, deploy-many" code. I am also a proponent of properly-versioned APIs, use of feature toggles, and the implementation of thorough test-suites.
Additionally, I pride myself in being a good technical leader. I believe that the work I do serves as a good example for those I work with. I enjoy coaching others, and I value providing other developers with knowledge and tools that will allow them to become more self-sufficient and produce higher quality code.
Unrelated to my official career in legal technology, I also have a passion project I do in my off time: MarsFeed is an Android application that gives you access to the latest NASA images from Mars. I took up learning Kotlin and Jetpack Compose in order to create a delightful Material Design app. The AWS backend systems that support it give me an opportunity to more freely explore and learn in the cloud outside the constraints of my day-to-day job. Check it out; it's free!
Technical Skills
Ranked by Confidence
Web Service / API Development
Continuous Delivery development practices
Android Development (Jetpack Compose)
Career Experience
| Oct 2024 - Current |
Position: (Continued) Lead Software Engineer - FindLaw Lawyer Directory Dev Team
Employer: FindLaw, Eagan, MN
- FindLaw was acquired by Internet Brands.
- Same team and application-stewardship as previous position, however priorities forced to shift towards acquisition and separation activities.
|
| April 2021 - Oct 2024 |
Position: Lead Software Engineer - FindLaw Lawyer Directory Dev Team
Employer: FindLaw, Eagan, MN
- Same team and similar responsibilities as previous position, but promoted from Senior level.
- Lead a years-long successful migration (and system redesign) of our apps to AWS.
- A system consisting of dozens of ugly and legacy apps was redesigned down to a handful of modern and maintainable apps serving the same business needs.
- We now operate a fully cloud-native infrastructure.
- The infrastructure was purposely designed to be migrated over the course of months, piece by piece. Utilizing feature toggles and try-and-verify every step of the way, ensuring virtually no customer-facing impacts.
- Successfully navigated a constantly-evolving (and painful) internal enterprise approvals process.
- Designed and implemented a secured and performant public-facing API consumed by a third party FindLaw partner.
- Lead a redesign of the controller/model/service layer of our public-facing app's codebase.
- Drastically improving maintainability through improved repo organization, removal of long-dead code and no-longer-relevant business logic, and simplifying redundant and duplicative code to single-source reusable functions/objects.
- Improving CPU utilization and server response times.
- Application tech stack:
- Java (17+)
- Spring/Spring boot
- Tomcat
- Cloudflare
- DataDog APM
- public and private APIs
- Amazon Web Services
- SNS+SQS
- OpenSearch
- ECS
- Lambdas
- PostgreSQL
- IAC/CloudFormation
- CloudFront
|
| Feb 2019 - April 2021 |
Position: Senior Software Engineer - FindLaw Lawyer Directory Dev Team
Employer: FindLaw, Eagan, MN
- Steward the overall health and direction of all applications supporting the lawyers.findlaw.com site.
- This site is supported by about a dozen different applications.
- Code best-practices enforced.
- Code and design reviews completed for most changes to the application.
- Code coverage required for all code changes (enforced by code review and build-time coverage check).
- Full build/deploy pipeline implemented (Build, unit test, dev deploy, integration test, qa deploy, etc).
- Application tech stack:
- Java (up to 11)
- Spring/Spring boot
- Tomcat
- Cloudflare
- Oracle SQL
- AppDynamics APM
- public and private APIs
|
| Sept 2018 - Feb 2019 |
Position: Senior Software Engineer - Project Dev Team
Employer: FindLaw, Eagan, MN
- Previous position was outsourced to contractors.
- I was asked to join this particular dev team to fulfill a technical leadership role not fully present previously.
- Project and team leadership left the company, so I had to assume many of those responsibilities (in addition to my other regular development responsibilities).
- Identical tech stack to previous positions.
|
| March 2017 - Feb 2019 |
Position: Application Steward
Employer: FindLaw, Eagan, MN
- I lead a group of 4 developers in charge of the overall health and direction of an application.
- This application was touched by most projects, and had a large user base.
- Code best-practices enforced.
- Code and design reviews completed for most changes to the application.
- Code coverage required for all code changes (enforced by code review and build-time coverage check).
- Full build/deploy pipeline implemented (Build, unit test, dev deploy, integration test, qa deploy, etc).
- Application tech stack:
- GWT (Java)
- Integrations with internal and external REST API's
|
| July 2016 - Sept 2018 |
Position: Senior Software Engineer - Small Enhancements Dev Team
Employer: FindLaw, Eagan, MN
- Promoted from previous position; same team.
- Continued responsibilities from previous position.
- Responsible for code/design reviews for the team.
- Helped mold technical direction of the department (along with other senior/lead developers).
|
| Oct 2013 - July 2016 |
Position: Software Engineer - Small Enhancements Dev Team
Employer: FindLaw, Eagan, MN
- All non-support and non-project development for FindLaw.
- Responsible for all ~120 deployed applications
- Full stack development.
- Oracle SQL DB layer
- Spring-based service layer
- Integrations with 3rd party API's
- Numerous front-end technologies (many quite dated), including
- Team was very geographically diverse.
- Navigated multiple unique language barriers:
- Chinese
- Indian
- Belarusian
|
| June 2013 - Oct 2013 |
Position: Software Engineer - Fulfillment App Team
Employer: FindLaw, Eagan, MN
- Full-time support and enhancements for projects related to internal fulfillment applications.
- Full stack development.
- Oracle SQL DB layer
- NetKernel service layer
- Google Web Toolkit front end
- Team was dissolved due to company restructuring.
|
Ongoing Learning Opportunities
| July 2020 |
Event: AWS Technical Workshops
Sponsor: FindLaw and Amazon
- 2-day immersive learning, lead by Amazon instructors
- Key topics:
- Compute options (EC2, containers)
- Lambda fuctions
- Native data solutions
- Serverless implementations
|
| March 2019 - May 2019 |
Event: Dojo Immersive Team Training
Sponsor: FindLaw
- Successfully applied:
- 2-day sprints
- Full team representation and integration
- development
- operations
- database
- product owners
- performance
- Highly-collaborative workspace, accommodating remote team members
- all-day video conference
- virtual whiteboarding/brainstorming
- MS Teams
- People and results > process and reporting
- Dojo Master: Kevin Burns (Agile Coach)
|
| 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020 |
Conference: No Fluff, Just Stuff
Location: Minneapolis, MN
- Key topics with applied relevance:
- Spring
- Java 8 syntax
- Continuous Delivery Pipelines
- Unit Testing with Spock
|
| Early 2017 |
Event: Agile Workshop Series
Sponsor: FindLaw |
| March 2016 - July 2016 |
Event: Continuous Delivery Book Club
Sponsor: FindLaw |
| Aug 2009 - May 2013 |
Degree: Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science
School: Saint John’s University, Minnesota |
Other Work Experience
| Aug 2010 - May 2013 |
Position: Student Supervisor (equivalent to Team Lead)
Employer: Fine Arts Programming, College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University, MN
- Manage a team of 4-8.
- Supervise the team during live events.
- Assist my superiors in team performance evals & department policies.
- Train new employees.
- Assume all responsibilities of Technical Aid (see description below).
|
| Aug 2009 - Aug 2010 |
Position: Fine Arts Technical Aid
Employer: Fine Arts Programming, College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University, MN
- Perform Stage Manager role during live events.
- Work as a team under strict time constraints.
- Execute independent decision-making given high-level requests from designers.
- Construct and detail sets and props.
- Program and operate live sound/light board; setup any necessary equipment.
|
| May 2006 - Aug 2010 |
Position: Cook/Cashier
Employer: Dairy Queen
- Face-to-face customer service in a fast-food environment.
- Handled the preparation of numerous simultaneous orders.
- Train new employees.
|
This Website
While I am not a front-end developer (and I don't have desires to become one full-time), this website was completely constructed by me. No templates or wysiwyg tools were used in the implementation of this site. Hosting and registration of this site is also managed by me.
Copyright © 2024 Isaiah Schultz
