Professional Software Engineer & Leader
Greater Chicago Area
- Current
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- Senior Software Developer (Ecommerce) at CDW
- Past
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- Application Developer at Wirestone
- Senior Internet Engineer at RollingStone.com
- Education
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- Loyola University of Chicago
- Illinois State University
- Portland State University
- Recommended
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2 people have recommended Stephen - Connections
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84
connections
- Industry
- Computer Software
- Websites
Stephen Rylander’s Summary
Stephen is passionate about improving his software practice and the industry. He focuses on software design, process improvement, TDD and automation. He has worked on two different public web platforms handling over 1 million daily page views and has a history of dealing with scale on the web.
Stephen is experienced in designing and delivering build automation infrastructures to increase team efficiencies. Especially interested in object composition, message passing and the human side of software engineering.
Juxtaposed with software engineering, Stephen also has a history of working with marketing and design clients leading and seeing complete sites from idea to implementation.
He is currently writing his thoughts on software development at ontheheap.com and his article "Building a Robust Development Environment" was published in the September 2008 issue of Dr. Dobbs Developers Journal.
Stephen is also a founder of the Chicago Architects Group and has spoken at various Microsoft events on ALM on the .NET platform.
Stephen Rylander’s Specialties:
Software design and development, specializing in scalable web site and application design. Currently working with TDD, .NET, Moq, ASP.NET AJAX, JQuery, Python, Google App Engine and, lastly (!), Amazon S3.
Research and experience with web user experience performance, e.g. excellence in HTML rendering with CSS and JavaScript; caching; CDN's (e.g. Akamai).
Stephen Rylander’s Experience
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Senior Software Developer (Ecommerce)
CDW
(Privately Held; Information Technology and Services industry)
September 2005 — Present (4 years 4 months)
CDW.com is a 2B a year ecommerce website. I function as a lead developer (coding architect), meaning I design and implement solutions that are technically sound, scale and improve our code base. I also lead our technical platform roadmap and act a thought leader for our platform.
Focus is on OO design with C#, ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005.
Experienced with Endeca guided navigation, search and caching clusters like Coherence.
Experience working with tracking metrics from KeyNote, Coremetrics and Akamai.
I was responsible for moving our code base to an improved source control platform and for creating our build and deployment automation. I wrote an article on the process of rebuilding our development environment which was published in Dr. Dobbs Developers Journal (ddj.com).
Also, recently, was architect on asynchronous gateway to increase throughput of product data to scale up. -
Application Developer
Wirestone
(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Marketing and Advertising industry)
February 2002 — September 2005 (3 years 8 months)
Led software development efforts for Chicago office as senior .NET Developer. Provided services for Fortune 500 companies to brand and market their goods a services. Heavy back-end and front-end development.
This position entailed working directly with project managers to create workable time lines and development schedules for marketing and sales clients. Also steered infrastructure decisions and manages co-location.
Built BlackCat, a marketing email tool. BlackCat used multiple threads to send messages, update the UI and provide information on email bounce rates. It performed all mail merging features.
Also built Cadence, a late-binding .NET component layer that provided plug & play capabilities to web applications. -
Senior Internet Engineer
RollingStone.com
(Internet industry)
May 2000 — January 2002 (1 year 9 months)
Responsible for presentation business logic and data retrieval layers of the RollingStone.com website on Windows 2000 and ASP/VB/SQL that registered over 1.5 million page views per day, often times spiking to as much as 4.5 million per day. Worked with software engineers to maximize performance and deploy the third version of the application. Acted as lead developer for Artist page, this was the most highly advertised and trafficked page, short of the home page.
Also, lead Internet Engineering team and participated in beta .NET labs at Microsoft as well as working with Microsoft engineers at Microsoft E-Commerce performance lab. Built micro-site web applications for various clients like Dr.Pepper, Diet Coke and Visa.
Stephen Rylander’s Education
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Loyola University of Chicago
Computer Science, Software Engineering 2007 — 2008
Graduate research in distributed systems with a focus on message queues.
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Illinois State University
BS , Public Relations, Computer Science , 1996 — 2000
Acted as network administrator for department of biology for 2+ years with office on campus. Split time between studies and rolling out IT projects. Biggest take away? Writing and communicating is the key to successful software projects.
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Portland State University
Software Engineering 2009
Studying in the OMSE (Oregon Master of Software Engineering) program. The OMSE is a real software engineering program focusing on methodologies and processes to build software.
"...Software engineering applies engineering and management principles to the challenges of constructing and maintaining software intensive systems and products."
Recently completed Software Project Management, which focused on a collective application of CMMI Dev2, IEEE standards and PMBOK.
Additional Information
Stephen Rylander’s Websites:
Stephen Rylander’s Interests:
software, cooking, professional cycling, reading
Stephen Rylander’s Groups:
Founding member of Chicago Architects Group
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.NET People -
Test Driven Development -
Chicago Architects Group
Stephen Rylander’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
- job inquiries
- expertise requests
- business deals
- reference requests
- getting back in touch
