Official CV
Personal Statement Self-starting, entrepreneurial, and versatile full-stack software engineer looking for an opportunity to learn new technologies and make lean, solid apps. My skillset includes, but is not limited to: Angular (1 through 7), TypeScript, HTML, CSS, MongoDB, JavaScript, NodeJS, C#, Web API, React, GraphQL, AWS, MySQL, and Docker, D3, Electron. Experience Special Events Rental December 2018 – Present
Role lead full-stack engineer
Technologies Electron, HTML, SCSS, TypeScript, Angular, D3, Git, Node
Description: ElectronJS-based desktop app to expedite rental invoicing
StreetDope December 2018 – PresentRole lead full-stack engineer
Technologies HTML, SCSS, TypeScript, React, GraphQL (Apollo), Git, Node, FreedCamp
Description: user generated content E-commerce site
AFT Analytics December 2018 – April 2019 (4 months - contract fulfilled)Saffron Loan Application Portal
Role frontend lead engineer
Technologies HTML, SCSS, TypeScript, Angular 7, Git, Atlassian suites, ProstgreSQL
Description: 4-step loan application portal using various 3rd party credit and bank vault APIs
Studio Designer 2018 – 2019 (1 year)Role senior full-stack engineer
Technologies HTML, SCSS, TypeScript, Angular 5, Golang, Node, GraphQL (Apollo), Git, Atlassian suites, Docker, ProstgreSQL, external API integration including Sendgrid, Payscape and PayPal
Description: 2.0 version of project management and accounting dashboard for interior designer
Vibrant Software 2016 – 2018 (2.5 years)Projects:
Patterson Custom Homes Portal
Role client, middle and mock tier engineer
Technologies HTML, CSS, TypeScript, Angular 2, C#, Web API
Description: management portal to setup and track home service appointments for contractors, subcontractors, and homeowners.
Hyundai Capital iCost Vehicle Costing Portal
Role client, middle and mock tier engineer
Technologies HTML, CSS, AngularJS, C#, Web API
Description multi-million dollar project; vehicle finance system and web dashboard to manage lease/retail vehicle costing for Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.
North American Transport Forum Management Portal
Role client and middle-tier engineer
Technologies HTML, CSS, AngularJS, C#, Web API
Description management portal for many aspects of the business including contacts, companies, peer reviews, surveys, workspaces, and letter template management.
Energy Regulatory Commission Violations Portal
Role client and middle-tier engineer
Technologies HTML, CSS, AngularJS, C#, Web API
Description violation reporting and tracking system for electrical grid reliability councils
Elemental Dolby Vision
Role NodeJS engineer
Technologies NodeJS, bash, Mocha, Chai
Description management portal for encoding and processing audio and video in the cloud.
Elemental JSOC
Role full stack developer
Technologies Angular 4, TypeScript, Node.js, Router-Controllers, Typescript all across the stack, Mocha, Chai, Angular-CLI
Description portal for elemental users to edit, start, and stop UDP channel transmitions
Vibrant CMS
Role full stack developer
Technologies Angular 5, TypeScript, C#, .NET Core, Mocha, Chai, Angular-CLI
Description content management system for internal use with all the features one would expect from a CMS including asset, page, and template creation and management
Personal and freelance projects Room’em 2014Role architect and full-stack developer
Technologies AngularJS, Node, Express, Mongo, Git, AWS EC2,
Description fully developed roommate matching app targeting the Brooklyn real estate market, complete with roommate matching coefficient calculation algorithm, and live chat messaging using web sockets
Lead’em 2018Role architect and full stack developer
Technologies Angular 5, TypeScript, Node, Express, Mongo, Git, Angular-CLI, AWS ECS and EC2, Docker
Description web app for real estate agents to store their sales leads in a reliable and searchable space to help increase firm revenues
Arcturus Films Website 2016Role WordPress Developer
Description website for a film production company made with fully custom WordPress theme (PHP, jQuery, MySQL)
nicolasroyonline.com Website (The site you are viewing here) 2016Role WordPress Developer
Description my personal website showcasing music and resume made with fully custom WordPress theme (PHP, jQuery, MySQL)
Multnomah Elementary Website 2015Role WordPress Developer
Description elementary school website made with a fully custom WordPress theme (PHP, jQuery, MySQL), event scheduling, fund raising progress bars, and administrative security levels for admins, publishers and teachers
Additional Engineering Experience CML RW Security 2014 - 2015Role electronics and automation engineer
Technologies C, Indusoft, VBScript, VBA
Description creation and deployment of security software in high risk LAN environments such as jails and courthouses, High degree of automation scripting in VBA and VB.Net
Universal Switching 2012 - 2014Role electronics engineer
Technologies C, C++, OrCAD Virtuoso
Description circuit design and firmware programming of Stanford architecture 8-bit chips in C ,C++, and assembly language
Additional Exposure, Education, and Interests digital signal processing, Three.js (WebGL wrapper), Neural Networks, Flask, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), machine learning, iOS mobile development, Python Education University of Southern California Bachelors of Science Electrical Engineering Graduated 2010 Masters Computer Science (Digital Signal Processing, Creative Technologies) In ProgressPixelMocha
After working at several software houses for a few years, I decided to try my hand at contract work. I stood up an LLC specifically for this purpose, Pixel Mocha, LLC. The first tasks I worked on under this company is Manifold, a multi-purpose desktop app, and MochaTime, a desktop timer utility that automatically logs time entries on an Excel sheet.
Vibrant Software
Software Development
I worked as an full stack developer at a dynamic Southern California software company and gathered a ton of experience in MEAN stack, TypeScript, C#, and unit testing technologies. The scope and size of the projects I worked on gave me the best possible exposure to the quality of work involved in making industrial, production grade, applications. The bulk of our workload was business-facing web apps. Among the clients were Hyundai Capital, North American Transport Forum, Energy Reliability Coalition, Elemental, and Patterson Homes. There were also government projects. For more details on this, see the Vibrant Software paragraph below.
I was also certified as an AWS Certified Developer Associate in May 2017.
Before School
The Pre-USC Years
Before my curiosity for math and science got the best of me, I worked with animals for about ten years. First as a dog trainer for two years, then as a veterinary assistant for eight years. I was also the songwriter and front man for several bands. It was only around my fifth year as a vet assistant that I undertook the daunting task of completing an undergraduate degree in engineering with high-school algebra-level math skills in community college. My first course in college was an introduction to C++. I had never known about programming before then, and I was hooked. My first personal piece of code was a little algorithm you could use to resolve a polyrythm. Say one hand was playing a pattern in a 7/8 time signature while the other played a pattern in a 4/4 signature, how many 4/4 measures would it take to for their combined patterns resolve, that is, for the combined pattern to repeat. When putting my algorithm into use, I realized that my question did not need a 4-parameter C++ program to find an answer. But the effort was fun, and I had found a new pastime.
The USC Years
Two years into my college career, I set my sights on USC, applied, and was admitted into the Electrical Engineering program as an upperclassman. My EE studies had very little emphasis on coding. The bulk of my coursework focused on subjects like semiconductor physics, analog circuitry design, MEMS, and VLSI. My team's senior project was a 3-speed bicycle, equipped with a force-sensing resistor and a PIC microcontroller, that automatically changed gears when detecting a change in pedaling pressure. It won the class contest that year. It is worth noting, for anyone reading this and hesitating to engage in higher education for lack of financial means, that USC, as well as many other private schools, have incredible financial aid programs at work. I barely had enough money to pay the rent, let alone foot a ~50K/year education bill. The USC endowment allowed me to benefit from a network of alumni who donate to the USC private fund for students in precisely my condition at the time. I will blog about this in my personal blog page soon.
After USC
Positions held since graduation
Orbits Lightwave • USC's EE program gave me great tools not only to find a job, but to be a good researcher for those times where I didn't even know where to start. My first job was at Orbits Lightwave, a Pasadena-based maker of high-quality, high-precision lasers used in everything from military to wind farming. My duties there were circuit layouts, load calculations, and sourcing the circuit components. The work involved a lot of technical writing. The fabrication was all done in-house, and we had direct access to the technicians putting our designs together. This afforded me a good deal of experience communicating with technical staff. Technologies used: Eagle, Access, electrical testing equipment (meters, oscilloscopes, etc). GCS • My next job was a short lived stint at a semi-conductor fabrication plant as a testing engineer. What I liked about this job was that it involved programming. The testing stations were Windows XP machines running VB6 and VBA custom applications written in-house. These applications ran every aspect of testing by communicating with the testing hardware, retrieving testing data, and doing statistical process control on the data. They also ran into bugs on a daily basis, and it was my job to fix them. After learning a sufficient amount of VB, I authored my own apps from scratch. I began to make random applications at home in the free version of VB.NET. I decided to find a job closer to home where I could actually write firmware for microchips. Technologies used: semiconductor testing hardware, VBA, VB6. Universal Switching • This is a quality programmable switching equipment manufacturer, as an electronics engineer. My duties were centered around board design. I designed circuit schematics and made their corresponding layouts using ORCAD 16.5. I owned projects and secured their completion by set deadlines. But best of all, I was given a development project to upgrade the displays on future unit designs. My task here was to take an off-the-shelf Reach screen, and to get them displaying system data with a pleasant, intuitive UI/UX. The Reach screen had its own limited on-board microcontroller that had to be programmed using Reach's own set of commands. The host board had an 8-bit TI microcontroller which I programmed in C. The result can be seen here or below. Technologies used: ORCAD 16.5, FCW (2D mechanical software), GIMP, electrical testing equipment, Keil chip programming interface, TI 8-bit microcontrollers. The farther along I went, the more I began to yearn for work that engaged the user directly. [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="http://nicolasroyonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/touch_screen.mp4"][/video]
CML RW Security
Programmer - 90% telecommute
I began working for CML RW Security as a programmer. This was my first telecommute position and my first position as a professional programmer. CML RW is a Denver-based company that deals almost exclusively in automated system for jails and prisons. The bulk of my duties was accomplished with MSSQL and Indusoft, a special HMI (Human Machine Interface) development environment using VBscript that facilitates network, UI, and hardware communication tasks, which is great for an environment where almost every door, intercom, and slider has to be controllable from a touchscreen. I also programmed PLCs, which are the hardware intermediary between the touchscreen and the individual control points (doors, etc). Things can get very complex when making updates on live facilities housing very dangerous individuals. The disaster scenarios involving Indusoft bugs and backward compatibility issues abound, so I had to learn some serious, cold-blooded, live debugging skills! Sometimes, this also meant driving 120 miles into the desert on a Sunday morning because 'something' went wrong and 'nothing is responding', which, alarmingly, is a common scenario in live-facility upgrades. My programming skills sharpened considerably, and I began to conceive of ways to expedite repetitive tasks using VBA. I had a vision of a way to do things that was shared and appreciated by the head programmer and managers. My work reviews were quite favorable, so when I asked for tuition assistance to get started on a graduate degree in electrical engineering, it was almost immediately accepted. So I applied for the EE - Multimedia and Creative Technologies masters program at USC, got in, and got started. Given my work load (at times 60-70 hours/week), I was only allowed to take a single class per semester. My first class was in Web Technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, JSON, XML, etc). In my second semester, I took a DSP (Digital Signal Processing) class. As previously stated, I began my work with CML RW Security as a telecommuting programmer at home in Los Angeles. About a year into it, however, our division manager left for greener pastures, and a new manager was set in his place. This new manager brought with him his own policies on running the security electronics branch, and eliminated the possibility of working from home for all of us. Being that I was in Los Angeles, I was given some time to consider moving to Denver to continue with the company. After several months, I had not changed my mind about remaining in Los Angeles, so I was let go - without hard feelings. Unfortunately, that also meant that I lost my tuition assistance, so my masters education is on hold at the moment. Technologies used: Indusoft 7.x, VBA, VB.NET, C++, Cx-Programmer, MSSQL Express, PLC, Harding Intercom Systems.
Vibrant Software
Full Stack Software Engineer - 100% remote
I was hired at Vibrant Software in March 2016. The first large scale API I worked on, and am still working on, is for Hyundai Capital America. The API is a vehicle pricing application for internal use. The backend is written in C#. Another is a MEAN application that will be used to switch visual feeds to monitors. Yet another is to process large audio visual files using Dolby technologies. Given the sensitive nature of this and other apps, I can't say much more. This is another remote position where Skype and other telecommunication technologies are used to keep the team in sync. The version control is Visual Studio TFS, since Visual Studio is the main development platform. There are also task automation scripts in Gulp, CSS pre-compiling in LESS, and Javascript testing tools like Mocha and Chai. Technologies used: Visual Studio, VSCode, TypeScript, C#, Javascript, Angular (1 & 2), Mongo, Express, Node, TFS