Barry Forrest

Red, Red, Red, Green! Refactor!

Certifications

Advanced Distributed Systems Design using SOA & DDD

PSPO level 1

PSM level 1

Agile Team Facilitation - ICAgile

Education

Journeyman Brewer

Eastfield College
2016

MCSD VB6

Southern Methodist University
1998

Interests

  • Homebrewing
  • Music
  • Nature Photography

Career Profile

As a Principal Consultant with Improving in Dallas, Barry is an agile-ist, web developer, technology generalist, and Scrum Master. Barry loves mentoring others, helping to make work-life balance better for teams, leaving things in a better state than when he arrived. Barry has co-presented talks at Agile 2018, Agile 2019, and several regional agile gatherings. Barry is also an award-winning homebrewer and an avid amateur photographer.

Employers

Software Developer

February 2021 - April 2021
Insight Global

3 month contract to help SRS Distribution with a platform conversion from MuleSoft to Azure functions.

Principal Consultant

July 2015 - December 2020
Improving Enterprises, Dallas

Senior Consultant

March 2015 - June 2015
Headspring (Dallas)

Senior Consultant

August 2010 - February 2015
Improving Enterprises, Dallas

Software Developer

November 2007 - August 2010
SML RFID (Xterprise)

Software Developer

December 2000 - November 2007
Perot Systems

Projects

Working as a consultant has enabled me to work on interesting problems in a variety of industries for multiple clients. Here are some of the highlights.

Lead Developer - Hilti Construction

Drove quality improvements to stabilize a microservice-based eCommerce platform. Reduced defect to story ratio from >7:1 to 3:1. Mentored a geographically dispersed team on quality practices including checking third-party libraries for vulnerabilities, Test Driven Development, reducing service coupling, and reviewing source for duplication and needless complexity.

eArchive (Halff Associates)

Created Azure Logic Apps and used Azure API Management Service to create a messaging platform to enable Halff to retire exchange servers. This API gateway empowered multi-channel communication – SMS, Teams, Slack, and other party applications.

Introduced Halff team members to the wonderful world of distributed, collaborative computing while implementing the MVP phase of a corporate data archival system. Used MassTransit sitting atop RabbitMq and Azure Service Bus to communicate with file servers located across the corporate LAN to catalog and archive data for civil engineering projects. Integration with corporate accounting (Deltek) triggered the archival of sensitive data.

Data Lake Extraction Pipeline (IHS Markit)

Created a messaging system with RabbitMQ and MassTransit to stream near real-time updates for 3rd party applications.

Azure DevOps deployment pipelines for AWS Lambda Functions. AWS CloudFormation templates for provisioning virtual private clouds and EC2 developer machines.

Gate Check (Premier Trailer Leasing)

Reduced inspection turnaround times for Premier’s check-in/out process. Developed an Angular single page application to guide inspectors when checking leased freight trailers in and out of a depot. The application ran on Samsung Galaxy Tablets and eliminated the need to transcribe data into a Microsoft CRM system.

RabbitMQ High Availability Federation Proof of Concept (Enterprise Products)

Prove the viability of using RabbitMQ and MassTransit as a durable, highly available messaging platform for processing IoT data streams. Findings enabled the company to replace $600,000 worth of annual hardware vendor contracts with the RabbitMQ backend system.

VB6 Conversion (IHS Markit)

Performed the roles of Scrum Master for a team porting financial calculation engines from VB6 to C#. Coach a development team on TDD, IOC containers, and crafting more malleable code. Reinforced leaderships' emphasis on test drive development through example code demonstrating solutions for a variety of problem types.

Billing System Gateway (Verizon/Terramark)

Embedded as a member of the Common Services Billing Team. Worked with the architecture team to develop features for an internal billing system. Diagnosed critical bugs, which were causing erroneous customer invoicing. Wrote modules to change usage metric storage from a GlustFS endpoint to a Cassandra database implementation. Populate a reporting database via Rabbit-MQ messages and handlers. Provided diagnostic data view for troubleshooting through Web API endpoints and AngularJS application modules.

Evidence Library (WatchGuard Video)

Worked with UX designer and implemented features for a new web-based search tool which expanded the capabilities of WatchGuard’s existing evidence library application. A single page application (SPA) using the DurandalJS framework, Web API, and Entity Framework Code First with Highway Data were the architectural choices. AmplifyJS enabled product demonstrations without the need to set up a distributed environment. Custom UI wrappers for playback controls enabled to use JWPlayer for video playback in the browser.

Store Directory (Cash America)

Delivered a client-side store locator with interactive services filtering and location plotting. The solution utilized Bing map services, Web API JSON data service, KnockoutJS for client-side interactivity, and application logic. Jasmine testing covered client-side JavaScript test cases. Prototyped the integration of a site re-design into the customers' existing Sitefinity content managed solution. Coached client developers on the use of MVVM data binding and integrating the new custom style sheets into their content management system.

United States Bowling Congress Scholarship Management Application (WaveTwo/Allcovered)

Created an ASP.Net MVC application enabling self-service scholarship creation and administration. User security and management thru Microsoft CRM and WCF proxy services. Financial report through Microsoft Great Plans using eConnect. Unit testing server-side with MSpec, client-side javascript testing with Jasmine.

HCSS Foreman (Heavy Construction Systems Specialist)

Delivered a web application prototype used for collecting daily activity reports at large construction sites. Web-based reports replaced a manually collated paper process and sped up the end of day reporting. Twitter bootstrap styling enhanced the user’s data entry experience.

eReady (Oz Systems)

ASP.Net MVC application for collecting and report Kindergarten and Pre-K student assessment data for the Texas Education Association. Created TopShelf windows services for processing uploaded data files. Decreased processing times by an order of magnitude by refactoring data relationships. Created multiple form-over-data screens.

CIMControlFramework (CCF) (Cimetrix)

Increased the total percent tool utilization by redesigning and refactoring the tool scheduler to enable the processing of parallel, concurrent jobs. Resolve production support issues and enhancement change requests as part of an SLA development team.

Active Retail System (Xterprise/SML RFID

Designed and developed Advanced Retail System (ARS). ARS is an RFID based system providing up-to-the-moment visibility and control of storewide inventory at the item and location level. A MassTransit message bus enabled decoupled asynchronous inventory operations. Blueprint CSS and ASP.net MVC2 powered the front end. Store inventory person-hours were reduced three-fold through using a mobile application running on Motorola 9090 and 3090 devices. Store shrinkage was reduced by 20%.

Reusable Transport Item(RTI) (Xterprise/SML RFID)

RTI enabled tracking pooled logistic pallets across over 60 distribution centers in the US. Integration with Rider logistics enabled manufacturers to ‘just-in-time’ request pallets for scheduled shipments.