John Wood

Current

Lead Engineer at Interactive Mediums

Past

Technical Lead at Orbitz Worldwide
Senior Software Engineer at Orbitz Worldwide
Software Engineer at Motorola

MIS Intern at Panduit

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Education

Northern Illinois University

Recommended

4 people have recommended John

Connections

117 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

John Wood’s Summary

A passionate software developer with experience in web application development, distributed systems development, and backend systems development. I have experience working on large and small projects, on large and small teams, in very fast paced environments. I am a proven leader on the job as well as off the job. Software development interests me because of its rapid pace, and large number of possibilities. I enjoy keeping up to speed with the industry, and I'm always looking for ways to improve as a software developer.

John Wood’s Specialties:

Detailed knowledge of Java, Java EE, Ruby, Rails, HTML, XML, Linux, Object Oriented design and development, TDD, SOA, Bash shell scripting, Distributed systems architecture, development, and deployment.

Strong knowledge of C, C++, Groovy, SQL, CSS, Spring, and NoSQL databases.

Basic knowledge of C# and PHP.

John Wood’s Experience

Lead Engineer

Interactive Mediums

(Privately Held; Information Technology and Services industry)

January 2009 — Present (11 months)

Maintain and enhance a mobile marketing platform, written in Ruby on Rails. This includes front end development, back end development, and some web design. Participate in all areas of the software development life cycle, including development, testing, deployment, and support. Along with the other engineers, responsible for the production environment, including the application and database servers. Work with customers to develop solutions to their problems. Also responsible, along with the other employees, to come up with new product ideas to improve our product and make it stand out against the competition.
Technical Lead

Orbitz Worldwide

(Public Company; OWW; Internet industry)

August 2008 — January 2009 (6 months)

Responsible for the technical direction of the back end air transactions team. Defined the high level architecture of the components the team owns, designed the components, improved the quality of the team's products by encouraging best practices, and introduced new technologies and processes that could help the team be more productive. In addition to these primary tasks, I also contributed code to projects as a software developer, represented the team in meetings discussing the technical direction of the company, mentored team members, diagnosed and resolved difficult production issues, and conducted research and development on projects that could potentially help the team and/or the business.
Senior Software Engineer

Orbitz Worldwide

(Public Company; CD; Internet industry)

August 2005 — August 2008 (3 years 1 month)

Senior Java developer on a team responsible for the applications that processed all air transactions on the Orbitz Worldwide sites. Developed software for a distributed system that processes millions of requests a day and is available 24/7. Found and fixed bugs in existing code, designed and developed new features at the request of our business partners, and constantly looked for ways to improve our products. Used several open source projects, such as the Spring Framework, to get projects out the door quick, with quality. Wrote and maintained Bash and Ruby scripts to automate tasks that the team was constantly being asked to perform. Diagnosed and resolved production issues.
Software Engineer

Motorola

(Public Company; MOT; Telecommunications industry)

May 2000 — August 2005 (5 years 4 months)

Worked on a startup project to develop a five nines common platform to be used by the cell phone call processing applications. Started when there were 0 lines of code for the project, and saw it through several production releases. Contributed to a C++ application that managed components in the system, a Java application that let users provision the system, and an Java / C++ (using JNI) adapter that managed messaging between the Java application and the C++ application. Also worked on a small team responsible for maintaining and adding features to DOS and Windows desktop applications that monitored traffic on Motorola's radio systems. Most projects were done using C, C++, and Java in various environments and architectures.
MIS Intern

Panduit

(Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing industry)

May 1998 — May 2000 (2 years 1 month)

Used COBOL and JCL to write several programs to assist in converting our database to Oracle. One of four members of the Y2K team, whose responsibility was to insure year 2000 compliance in Panduit’s financial systems. Fixed problems with production systems by request of the user.

John Wood’s Education

Northern Illinois University

Bachelors in Computer Science , Computer Science, Business , 1996 — 2000

Minor in Business Administration.

Recipient of a 1999-2000 Deans’ Award, which are given to students who have made substantial contributions to the university community and who have demonstrated outstanding scholarship.

Recipient of the Kraft Foods Scholarship, an award given to students who exhibit excellence in academics in the Computer Science Department at NIU.

Activities and Societies:

President of the Student Advisory Board for Computer Science, Member of the Golden Key National Honor Society