Christopher Shepherd

Currently working full-time for an S-corporation co-owned by my wife and myself (Brown, Everett, and Lewis being historical names from our family trees). I personally serve in various software development oriented roles such as Individual Contributor, Technical Lead, and Architect on a contract basis using tech stacks including Node, React, Ruby on Rails, and PHP/Laravel. Recent engagements include:

• Lockerverse, a web3-based Disney Accelerator 2022 participant. Performed extensive work as an Individual Contributor on both frontend and backend using node.js, NestJS, and React, to interact with Solana and Polygon blockchains. Company was featured on Disney Demo Day 2022 (November 10, 2022 on ABC News / Good Morning America) and will begin minting NFT series (including exclusives like Drum Major Mickey and originals from Bronny James and the Nipsey Hussle estate) from QR codes that are displayed at various sporting events.
• Colonize Mars - I'm currently serving as Engineering Lead at this multiplayer online strategy game leveraging NFT assets and blockchain techniques to provide a complete economic simulation of life on a Mars colony.

Served as frontend engineering manager for this incredibly-fast-growing Atlanta-based SaaS startup. The company's core services are built around a PHP/Laravel backend, MySQL database, and Angular frontend. Although I still wrote both frontend (Angular) and backend (PHP/Laravel) code at this job, leadership duties included:

• Refinement and grooming of new features
• Prioritization of urgent fixes
• Customer-facing engineering support
• Interviewing new-hires, having regular 1:1 meetings with existing frontend engineers

I learned a lot about management and enterprise sales here, but ultimately wasn't comfortable getting too far away from the software engineering career track.

Served as Technical Lead of two squads at this industry-leading home fitness company:

• As lead of the Live Workouts squad, I helped to maintain both backend features (such as the AWS Lamba microservice that served as the source of truth for the live workouts schedule) as well as frontend features (such as the React-based webview that is surfaced on thousands of home fitness machines to select and begin iFIT live workouts). Also created automation to recycle live workouts from AWS MediaConnect for replay as Video-on-Demand.
• As lead of the Closed Captioning squad, I helped to ensure an ADA-compliant implementation of closed captioning for workouts in addition to the orderly queueing of thousands of captioning jobs for Video-on-Demand workouts in several languages with rev.com and rev.ai.

This was an amazing experience and I would have stayed forever, but the end of pandemic lockdowns caused a crash in the home-fitness market, and this company reacted by making deep cuts, freezing compensation, and ultimately changing the once-amazing engineering culture.

Engagements for this partnership / agency included:

• Earth Rated (2011-Present): Maintained and extended a Ruby on Rails logistics app for this Montréal, QC vendor of pet products. PDF-based form generation, integration with logistical partners and vendors, and more. Also delivered a rewrite of the application based on node/express/React.
• WB Digital / Flixster (2015-2017): Helped to create ElasticSearch- based search solutions for Flixster streaming video service, as well as WordPress-based corporate intranet.
• Clips4Sale (2011-2019): Added cryptographic signatures to downloads to fight piracy. Created live video chat solutions between actors and Borgata hotel guests with Wowza Media Server and Enseo set-top boxes. Updated search from slow MySQL queries to fast ElasticSearch. Was responsible for all commerce/payment programming. Migrated away from card number storage, creating a fully-tokenized cascading billing platform to greatly lessen PCI-DSS compliance burdens. Facilitated migration to new corporate owner Mindgeek.
• Other projects including two certified Tier-1 PCI-DSS compliant payment providers.

After 15 years, the three major shareholders went in different directions: One remained in a long-term engagement at Mindgeek, one went on to co-found Bird Rides, and I sought exposure to new technologies and career tracks.

• 1994 (Interstate Networking Corporation) - Founded one of Kansas City's first Internet providers while still in high school, using a pair of Sun SPARCStations and a SprintLink T1. Eventually sold our customer list to a larger operation.
• 1996 (Tiburon Entertainment / EA Sports) - Updated Madden 96 for Super Nintendo with new penalties, situations, and artwork to develop Madden 97.
• 1997 (Hard Rock Cafe International) - Worked as System Administrator at Hard Rock Cafe's International Headquarters, leveraging a newly-deployed frame relay network to roll out companywide management of point-of-sale systems and realize cost savings by eliminating long-distance FAXes
• 1999 (Aion Idea Group LLC) - Worked as a software developer for several years at this paysite operator, developing payment acceptance solutions, fraud prevention software, ethical mass-mail tools, ad servers, and more.