Brandon Harper

Current

Senior Software Engineer at Symplified, Inc.

Past

Senior Software Engineer at BT Conferencing
Softwarist at Me.dium
Author at Java Developers Journal & ColdFusion Developers Journal

Editorial Board Member at ColdFusion Developer's Journal
Senior Software Developer at Acxiom
Senior Software Developer at InsightAmerica
Senior Software Developer at Mallfinder Network
Technical Editor, Inside ColdFusion MX at New Riders Publishing
Software Developer at Tesser
Webmaster at Online Marketing Network
Webmaster at University of Northern Colorado
Technical Support Represenative at Startek

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Education

Regis University
University of Northern Colorado

Recommended

5 people have recommended Brandon

Connections

238 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Brandon Harper’s Summary

Talented and experienced software engineer with sound academic principals and 11 years of experience with internet based applications. Thorough understanding of web based applications all the way from J2EE application servers down to the OSI model used to connect to them. Solid Computer Science principals yet flexible and open-minded about alternative development implementations. Self-teaching and an early adopter/tire kicker for many applications and technologies.

Personality-wise I'm pragmatic, curious, and humble. Very passionate about technology in general. Great communicator in both written and oral forms. As an experienced engineer in both startups and large companies, I have a great sense of the sweet spot between "fast" and "good" in order to support both the short and long term goals of business.

Brandon Harper’s Specialties:

Overall, I specialize in building or enhancing enterprise Java applications to be simple, flexible, based on open standards, scale to handle high levels of traffic, provide high availability, be easily manageable, and behave predictably. This includes everything such as automating repetitive tasks to collaboratively designing clustered or cloud based systems.

The buzzwords:
Java, ColdFusion, JRun, JBoss, Tomcat, J2EE Clustering and Tuning, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X, Maven, and Spring.

Brandon Harper’s Experience

Senior Software Engineer

Symplified, Inc.

(Privately Held; Information Technology and Services industry)

October 2009 — Present (2 months)
Senior Software Engineer

BT Conferencing

(Telecommunications industry)

May 2008 — October 2009 (1 year 6 months)

Worked on a small, agile team of J2EE Engineers for BT Conferencing, which served over 75% of the Fortune 500 with audio and video conferencing related products and services.
Softwarist

Me.dium

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

February 2007 — February 2008 (1 year 1 month)

I was hired as part of a team of founding engineers to build and scale various parts of Me.dium's infrastructure during the seeding phase of financing which resulted in a very successful infusion of venture capital. Technology I used over several different technology areas included JBoss, EJB3, Spring, Hibernate, Apache Wicket, Apache Tomcat, Jetty, NIO, Jabber/XMPP, and PostgreSQL.
Author

Java Developers Journal & ColdFusion Developers Journal

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Media Production industry)

February 2004 — October 2007 (3 years 9 months)

Wrote technical and opinion articles about technology related to Java and ColdFusion.
Editorial Board Member

ColdFusion Developer's Journal

(Privately Held; Publishing industry)

October 2006 — September 2007 (1 year )

Provided guidance and steering for the leading and longest running ColdFusion magazine, the ColdFusion Developer's Journal. Also contributed articles, provided technical editing, suggested content, and other related duties.
Senior Software Developer

Acxiom

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; ACXM; Information Technology and Services industry)

September 2005 — February 2007 (1 year 6 months)

I architected and developed large enterprise applications in Java, ColdFusion, and Python, and also provided system design and tuning for several clusters of J2EE application servers. Enterprise subject matter expert on ColdFusion and server tuning and helped other divisions in Acxiom with ColdFusion related questions and J2EE performance issues. I also mentored other developers in my immediate group emphasizing best practices and a good balance between productivity and process keeping good Computer Science and Software Engineering principals in mind.
Senior Software Developer

InsightAmerica

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

February 2003 — September 2005 (2 years 8 months)

Direct employer changed to Acxiom as part of an acquisition of InsightAmerica by Acxiom. See my Acxiom section for more information about this position.

In general, much of my time was spent architecting new products, and making them scale during periods of rapid growth.
Senior Software Developer

Mallfinder Network

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

November 2001 — February 2003 (1 year 4 months)

Contributed to a unified ColdFusion application framework which supported over 200 major mall websites. Wrote a custom statistical analysis system, a banner campaign engine, and helped write a caching framework to handle extreme traffic loads during holiday seasons.

I also served as the in-house DBA for SQL Server 2000 and MySQL. I wrote all stored procs, views, backup scripts, etc., and maintained our database servers.
Technical Editor, Inside ColdFusion MX

New Riders Publishing

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Media Production industry)

March 2002 — July 2002 (5 months)

Provided technical editing, code examples, and other various publishing duties for the book "Inside ColdFusion MX", ISBN 0735713049
Software Developer

Tesser

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Graphic Design industry)

October 1999 — November 2001 (2 years 2 months)

Wrote and maintained many ColdFusion based websites for this branding and design agency. Also wrote the Tesser CMS which was used on all content based Tesser websites. Worked on sites such as netidentity.com (now owned by Tucows), kelty.com, etc. Wrote an application framework used on all Tesser sites (pre Fusebox 3), and also developed programming standards for other developers and contractors to follow.

I also maintained our small hosting environment including Windows 2000 & FreeBSD servers, Sendmail, IIS, a Cisco router, etc.
Webmaster

Online Marketing Network

(Internet industry)

June 1998 — October 1999 (1 year 5 months)

Designed websites, helped maintain and expand the server environment, and helped with ColdFusion applications. Helped develop and configure servers for bid4vacations.com, which received over 2 million visitors per month and was featured on CNet TV and the New York Times.
Webmaster

University of Northern Colorado

(Government Agency; 501-1000 employees; Higher Education industry)

January 1998 — May 1998 (5 months)

Webmaster for the Arts and Sciences department at UNC. Worked with various department chairs, and also helped maintain webservers.
Technical Support Represenative

Startek

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

September 1997 — December 1997 (4 months)

Technical Support agent representing Hewlett Packard printers. In of the top 5 reps in our location by my second month of employment based on call time and customer satisfaction.

Brandon Harper’s Education

Regis University

Computer Science 2002 — 2006

Done with most of my Computer Science coursework which was primarily focused in Operating Systems, Software Engineering, Algorithms, Computation Theory, etc. Currently in the last semester of my Junior year. Working at startups hasn't left me with enough time to make much progress on this lately.
University of Northern Colorado

Computer Science 1997 — 1998