Alexander Justin Kerchum

Senior/Lead Software Engineer

About Me

I am passionate about doing software development the right way: this means striking the right balance between future-proofing and keeping it simple. I love getting into the flow and making magic on my screen. I believe a little bit of research and questioning can lead to a drastically better product, and a healthier relationship between engineering and product. I love solving harder problems; it helps me express creativity and artisanship. I value concise, honest, and open communication. This includes accepting criticism without taking it personally, and acting on it to improve myself and my work. I generally learn technical topics and domain knowledge quickly. I return to exceptionally challenging topics over and over again, improving my capability in those areas over time. I became a certified scrum master when I became a team lead and I feel that the subjects learned during that, coupled with actual experience leading, have made me a very effective developer advocate. I think this is absolutely essential for a healthy team. I enjoy imparting new knowledge on others: sometimes this means showing my team something cool I recently learned, and other times it might mean mentoring another engineer in an area where I am an expert.

Experience

Upstart

Senior Software Engineer

2022 - Present

upstart.com

Upstart's mission is to enable effortless credit based on true risk.

Member of the Auto Platform team Responsibilities include: Identify and resolve the most impactful issues facing my team Assess and mitigate risks in new initiatives including architectural issues Design and build new microservices including robust documentation and requirements gathering Break down larger work into smaller pieces to be worked in a team setting Robust and honest code reviews Work with relevant AWS technologies and their locally run counterparts (RDS, Postgres, Lambdas, S3, SQS, RabbitMq) Selected accomplishments:

  • Advocated for containerizing an existing application and played a critical role in delivering on that initiative, resulting in vast and immediate improvements for developer experience and runtime performance
  • Worked with Kubernetes to deploy multiple containerized services; autoscaling, ephemeral environments, functional testing, CI using Jenkins
  • Focused on observability when working on large initiatives: distributed tracing when working on performance issues, coverage reports when exacting large amounts of code into a microservice, structured logging to easily triage production issues, metrics for running pods to assess cost and right-sizing
  • Cross-team collaboration and coordination for large initiatives

Autosoft DMS

Senior Software Engineer/Team Lead (CSM)

2018 - 2022

autosoftdms.com

Autosoft is an innovative technology platform that has been recognized as the All-Time Most Recommended DMS.

Responsibilities include: Maintaining and building a multi-tenant SaaS application used by thousands of organizations across the United States. Helping the organization transition from SOA to a Microservice architecture. Facilitating a culture of collaboration in several teams across the platform. Advocating on behalf of other engineers to reduce stress and improve productivity. Leading platform-wide technical initiatives and resolving tech-debt. Coordinating implementation efforts within and across teams. Teaching and advocating for true software craftsmanship across the organization. Selected accomplishments:

  • Transitioned the development organization from SVN to Git (several repositories with tens of thousands of commits retained in history)
  • Resolved several Severity 1 outages in an individual and team oriented setting.
  • Lead the effort to transition from AngularJS to Angular (multiple approaches taken)
  • Leadership role in evolving services into microservices

Youngstown State University

Web Application Specialist/Programmer Analyst 4

2016-2020

ysu.edu

An Institution of Opportunity: YSU inspires individuals, enhances futures, and enriches lives.

Responsibilities include: Optimizing existing codebases; repairing reported bugs; building new requested features and software; Groovy/Grails development; full stack web development; maintaining and updating server-side software; building and deploying web applications to Linux servers; provisioning software for Linux servers; open source contributions; accessibility compliance (Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 AA+); REST API development; utilize Amazon Web Services; building and maintaining PL/SQL packages in Oracle; working with Ellucian Banner; Set up and maintain team version control system (Git via GitLab).

Youngstown State University

Web Programmer/CMS Developer

2012-2015

ysu.edu

An Institution of Opportunity: YSU inspires individuals, enhances futures, and enriches lives.

Responsibilities include: Timely completion of projects involving database access (retrieval, storage, joins), content management systems (ContentM, Drupal, custom systems), and public interfaces; exploring new technologies; optimizing/repairing existing codebases; working efectively in a small team; Groovy/Grails, Laravel, and AngularJS development;

Education

Youngstown State University

BS Computer Science

2016

I spent much of my time at the university working on the student web team. This experience kick-started my career and exposed me to real world requirements.

Outside of work

I love working on cars. Cars and computers have a lot of overlap, and I love that too.