Alex Southgate

southgate at gmail
(917) 691-8155
Brooklyn, NY
San Francisco, CA

Summary

A LAMP-stack web engineer with a 70/30 backend/frontend split, available for hire on a contract basis. I provide 10 years of experience and a tight network of talented engineers focused on turning business needs into elegant, scalable, and performant solutions.

Experience

Parker Wallace, San Francisco, CA
Partner / Second Rate Genius, May 2006 - Present
  • Partial client list:
  • TabletHotels, Inc. - Designed, implemented, and maintained in Webware (Python) over 2 years
  • sheetmusicplus.com - Rewrote 12 year old web and back-office application in Rails in 4 months
  • Live Climate - Designed and implemented in Rails in 2 months. (acquired by Carbonfund.org in August, 2009)
  • Mission Motor Company - In progress conversion from static to dynamic content and simple e-commerce web application. Implemented in Django.
Transparensee, New York, NY
Engineer, November 2000 - January 2006
  • Guiding product direction driven by client feedback, developer innovation, and business strategy.
  • Leading all technical sales and integrations, interacting with everyone involved from CEO to developers, resulting in 10 six-figure contracts.
  • Building out demos and proofs of concept in Ruby on Rails, PHP, .NET, and ColdFusion.
  • Designed and developed scalable fuzzy search engine as one of a 3-person agile development team (pure Java).
Learning In Progress, New York, NY
Co-Founder, March 2000 - October 2000
  • Led team in design and implementation of collaborative learning application using C++, Qt, and XML.
  • Implemented simple, effective NT/Linux office network.
Sapient Corporation, New York, NY and Washington, DC
Senior Engineer, November 1999 - March 2000
gs.com (Goldman Sachs), New York, NY
  • Led team of four in design and prototyping of administrative functionality for online IPO web application in a WebLogic environment.
  • Acted as main liaison between client's technical infrastructure team and Sapient development team.
Engineer, August 1998 - November 1999
fbr.com, Washington, DC
  • Led team of three in site creation, enhancement and maintenance of IPO web application using ASP, IIS, and SQL Server.
  • Implemented database driven email management system used to keep customers informed of IPO activity.
  • Streamlined workflow through legal, marketing, and production teams in maintaining email communication with customers.
priceline.com, Jersey City, NJ
  • Gathered requirements for customer tracking and promotions database.
  • Functioned as liaison with clients to migrate designed tables into existing Oracle databse.
Dun & Bradstreet, Jersey City, NJ
  • Implemented HP/UX based scheduling system for back office solution.
  • Collaborated with clients to integrate scheduling system with existing systems management infrastructure (HP OpenView).
TERI Research, Little Silver, NJ
Research Engineer, May 1997 - September 1997
  • Designed and implemented three dimensional spatial audio separation algorithm in C.
  • Composed and presented technical reports to management and military clients.

Education

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
B.S. Computer Science, minor in Cognitive Science, May 1998
French Language Courses, 2004

Technical Skills

  • Focus on the LAMP stack, proficient in TDD and CI, and investigating BDD.
  • Fluent: Java, Python
  • Conversational: Ruby, XSLT, C/C++, PHP, SQL, ASP
  • Survival: Lisp, French
  • System/Network Administration (mostly Debian Linux)