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Alan Koskelin
al@koskelin.com | (608) 577-7913

Qualifications & Skill Set

Work Experience

Business Systems Developer

Rowland Reading Foundation - Middleton, WI - 2011 to present
  • Develop software and business systems with the Microsoft stack
    • Created and continue to develop software to aid inventory management decisions and demand forecasting for 1000+ SKUs and millions of dollars of inventory
    • Expand and improve web-based classroom technology product for teachers, parents, and students
    • Support and improve customizations to ERP system to facilitate data integration and to optimize order-entry process
  • Facilitate and promote Scrum adoption
  • Company focus: non-profit, teaching children to read
  • Technical environment: C#.NET, ASP.NET, SQL Server 2008, ADO.NET Entity Framework for object-relational mapping (ORM), web services (XML / SOAP), Microsoft Dynamics GP 10 & 2010, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Windows Server 2008
  • Tools: Visual Studio 2010, Subversion & TortoiseSVN, JIRA + GreenHopper, Redmine

Bioinformatics Programmer/Analyst

UW Madison / Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center - Madison, WI - 2012
  • Introduced unit testing in a bioinformatics system written with Ruby on Rails

Database Software Developer

CPM - Madison, WI - 2010 to 2011
  • Developed software in object-oriented Python, PL/SQL; transformd data with Perl; wrote complex SQL
  • Worked with multiple healthcare / medical informatics databases simultaneously
    • Constructed new single source of truth databases from disparate data sources including electronic health records (EHR)
    • Augmented existing databases with additional data sources
  • Expanded and improved a physician relationship management product and the implementation process
  • Developed Python training program including examples of object-oriented programming and implementing unit testing and test-driven development (TDD)
  • Ported code from Oracle to Greenplum
  • Conducted root cause analysis on existing systems and databases
  • Performed data quality assurance (QA)
  • Contributed documentation to the company wiki (Confluence)

Software Developer & Consultant

2009 to 2010
  • Developed software for real-time PCR / qPCR data analysis.
  • Developed web software that allows radio station listeners to influence the songs that play on-air.
    • Technical environment: JQuery / AJAX / Javascript, RESTful APIs, XHTML, PHP
  • Developed software, as a part of a Scrum team, that automates search engine optimization (SEO) as it pertains to organic search results.
    • Improved and scaled the implementation of a new algorithm, so that it could be more widely used, by refactoring code and writing complex SQL queries that leveraged a data warehouse
    • Internationalized software and databases in order to support multi-byte characters / UTF-8
    • Participated in multiple sprints and a formal testing process
    • Technical environment: PHP, proprietary MVC framework, MySQL databases and data warehouse (star-schema)
    • Tools: Eclipse, Rally, VersionOne, MySQL Workbench
  • Developed software to generate online maps of natural resources monitoring data

Bioinformatics Scientist & Data Manager

Third Wave Technologies, an Hologic company - Madison, WI - 2008 to 2009
  • Collaborated in all steps of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
    • Gathered user needs
    • Wrote and revised software development plans and specifications
    • Developed and maintained Oracle Web applications to track product performance and/or enable researchers to mine medical informatics
    • Wrote, revised, executed, and reported on validation procedures to ensure software performance
  • Provided expertise via code reviews
  • Worked in an FDA-regulated, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), and Quality System environment as a member of the R&D department of an ISO 13485 registered company
  • Worked in the life science industry in a biotechnology manufacturing environment and molecular diagnostics setting using Invader chemistry: detection of DNA base pair changes using oligonucleotides, Förster / fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) probes, DNA-cleaving enzymes, and fluorescent signal detection
  • Notable projects:
    • Collaboration and validation on multiple revisions to the main bioinformatics database application
    • Revision to and maintenance an inventory application used to service agriculture customers
    • Application to track and visualize water quality data
  • Technical environment:
    • Oracle: three databases, at least three schemas in each with dozens of tables consisting mostly of bioinformatics data; Oracle Application Express, PL/SQL, most in packages to support APEX applications and data flow
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
    • Java for data integration
    • Perl for bioinformatics
    • SAS JMP for statistical analysis
  • Tools:

Project Manager

Netconcepts - Madison, WI - 2008

  • Improved project delivery process, namely by introducing agile and iterative development and delivery
  • Managed the needs and expectations of clients and coworkers
  • Managed the concurrent delivery of four web development projects including ecommerce sites for companies selling:
    • cancer awareness products that donates 10% of sales to cancer research
    • commercial, industrial, and military carrying cases
    • emergency medical supplies and equipment and school nurse supplies
  • Ensured projects conformed to search engine optimization (SEO) best practices
  • Technical environment: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) with in-house MVC (model-view-controller) framework and PEAR libraries

Software Project Coordinator / Lead Developer

enetrix, now a Gallup company - Madison, WI - 2003 to 2008
  • Developed Web applications using Oracle technologies
    • Refined and expanded database architecture and design (tables, relationships, stored procedures, triggers, other database objects)
    • Performance-tuned SQL, PL/SQL, and software systems
    • Implemented data warehouses for reporting and business intelligence (BI)
    • Extracted, transformed, and loaded data (ETL)
  • Maintained the vision, architecture, and integrity of core reusable products:
    • Enterprise Feedback Management, customer relationship management (CRM), surveying, and reporting
    • Web content management and ecommerce
    • Online voting
  • Lead and trained technical staff
    • Implemented and championed an internal wiki for effective documentation and communication, thus reducing implementation and support overhead
    • Organized and lead inter-department meetings to redesign user interfaces of core software systems
    • Trained and mentored developers, database administrators, and other technical staff on the design and architecture of software products and the development environment
  • Coordinated software development
    • Built consensus and acted as a catalyst among executive management, clients, software architects, developers, graphic designers, survey & report designers, support staff
  • Advised executive management on software development strategies
    • Gathered requirements and determined scope and direction of projects in ways that grew core products while maintaining an overall integrity
    • Determined time and resource estimations
    • Prioritized and delegated tasks
    • Reviewed past performance relative to estimations and expectations
  • Notable projects:
    • Online salary survey site for an organization related to credit union compensation
    • Business-to-business (B2B) site for a company selling food safety, counter service, and washroom products
    • Contributed to human resources survey site for a Fortune 500 company
    • Identified and demonstrated SQL-injection vulnerability; worked as a part of a team to develop a workaround
  • Technical environment:
    • Oracle 8-10g: eight databases, three application servers, dozens of schemas with hundreds of tables in each, numerous database links
    • Oracle PL/SQL: most in packages, about 1.5 million lines of code, much shared across schemas
    • HTML, Javascript, XML, XEP (render XML to PDF), Java (ecom transactions, Excel & XML conversion, data integration via JDBC)
    • SPSS for statistical analysis
  • Tools:
    • TOAD & SQL Developer
    • MKS
    • ERD / logical & physical modeling tools: Dia, Visio, and Oracle Designer
    • XMLSpy (test & troubleshoot transformation of XML & XSLT to XSL-FO, generate XML schema definitions)

Software Developer / Analyst

Other software, database, web development, and system administration work since January, 1997
  • Gathered requirements to design logical and physical database models; implemented database-driven Web (LAMP, HTML, Javascript, Photoshop) and desktop (Visual Basic, MS Access) applications:
    • Document management system for a hospital with over 270 physicians in 35 specialties
    • State-wide high school football statistics and playoff web software
    • Custom, from-scratch e-commerce system including industry-specific features
    • Custom database-driven desktop application
  • Technical environments & tools: HTML, Javascript, IIS, SQL Server, Cold Fusion, Classic ASP, Photoshop, Apache, Perl, shell scripting / Bash, BIND, Sendmail

Education

University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, August 2001

Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Information Systems, minor in Writing. Relevant topics studied: C++, Oracle and SQL, system analysis & design, systems documentation, Visual Basic.

Madison College, Fall 2010

Introduction to Bioinformatics course. Relevant topics studied: design and implementation of bioinformatics software, molecular biology, EMBOSS, DNA/RNA/protein sequence alignment & sequence comparison (BLAST, dot plots), metagenomics, phylogenetic trees, FASTA, Perl and regular expressions, dynamic programming, open reading frame (ORF) and gene-finding, hidden markov models

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