Zachary C. Miller-Ember
Business Process and Software Development Consultant
About Me
I am an expert in web application development, the management of software engineering teams, and the agile business processes that empower those teams.
I have been writing data-driven web applications since 1993, when both I and the web were young. I am a technical jack-of-all-trades, with extensive experience with software engineering, full stack web development, database administration, data analytics, system administration, requirements analysis, agile project management, hiring processes, human resource allocation, revenue operations, customer relationship management, sales and marketing process, customer service process, and business intelligence. I love solving hard problems and my passion is maximizing efficiency and quality in completely distributed workforces.In my spare time I play with power tools, board games, bicycles, harmonicas, and audio gear.
Work Experience
Director of Business Operations at 42 Lines Inc, Chicago, Illinois, United States
2020 - 2022
As our company moved from bespoke contract software engineering to a SaaS product sales strategy with its Harmonize product for Learning Management Systems, I took on Revenue Operations (RevOps) duties along with running the hiring process for Sales and Marketing leadership roles. My existing business process duties expanded to include the design and implementation of:
- integration and syncing between Salesforce, HubSpot, DocuSign, ZoomInfo, and FreshDesk
- sales and marketing automation, reports, and workflows
- report sales and marketing metrics to the CEO to inform strategic decisions
- data cleanup, normalization, merging, and import (ETL) from disparate sources for Salesforce and HubSpot.
Director of Project Management at 42 Lines Inc, Chicago, Illinois, United States
2018 - 2020
As our bespoke contract software engineering company grew to support multiple clients. I was tasked with expanding the Project Management Department, adapting our processes to allow for simultaneous sprints, resource allocation, hiring processes for new roles, expansion of the company to 50 employees.
- Analysis of both individual performance metrics and project status metrics in Google Sheets and Tableau using data I extracted through APIs from JIRA, Git, Google Sheets, Confluence, Tom's Planner, Google Calendar, Tempo Timesheets, Smart Sheets, and other systems.
- acted as Business Intelligence Analyst, Sales Department Manager, and QA Department Manager during times when these roles were empty
- Supervised a Project Manager and a Project Management Assistant.
- Facilitated senior management meetings and strategic retreats.
- Facilitated a shift from Scrum to Kanban for mature projects.
Project Manager at 42 Lines Inc, Chicago, Illinois, United States
2010 - 2018
I managed a team of 20 fully remote software engineers, QA testers, designers, and devops engineers to formulate iteration plans and deliver on time.
- designed custom workflows in JIRA to support Scrum processes for a fully remote team.
- led the transformation of the company from ad hoc workflows to well managed Scrum.
- administrator for entire self-hosted Atlassian Suite (JIRA, Confluence, Crowd, Bamboo, Fisheye/Crucible).
- designed and maintained company policies relating to Hiring, Onboarding, Offboarding, and HR.
- ran retrospectives.
- oversaw sprint metrics
- reported directly to the CEO.
- developed billing software to generate invoices from JIRA data
- developed many API integrations between project management tools
- event management for semi-annual company retreat events that brought our fully remote employees together for team building.
- thanks to my unique Digital Video experience I also designed and implemented a custom streaming video infrastructure as well as an HTML5 client side video recording interface
- acted as in-house PHP expert as needed by our clients
- assisted engineering team with data modeling
Software Development Consultant at CAM Systems, Oak Park, Illinois, United States
2017 - 2019
Part-time consulting project.
- Developed a Perl daemon in OpenShift / Kubernetes / Docker infrastructure to run periodic MySQL queries to detect certain data events and log them as JIRA tickets via REST API.
- Provided general assistance with application migration and deployment (DevOps) of the company's Java web application.
Web Development Manager at G Media Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
2009 - 2010
Managed all aspected of software development for a multimedia publishing company.
- Hired and managed a team of 5 direct reports (2 full stack programmers, 1 front-end engineer, 1 designer) while acting as lead programmer.
- Implemented Agile+XP methodology with Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) and Test Driven Development (TDD).
- Reported directly to the CEO.
- Produced revenue and site usage reports to inform, implement, and measure marketing initiatives.
Lead Programmer at G Media Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
2007 - 2009
Architect and implementation lead for a custom in-house subscription-based multimedia content management system.
- Developed frameworks and standards for next generation content management.
- Developed and maintained internal software systems for asset management, customer support, marketing, project management, payments processing, and continuous integration use.
- Architect for XML/XLST based content management system with an emphasis on multi-lingual content delivery (i18n / l10n) and efficient separation of front-end and back-end concerns.
Features Programmer at G Media Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
2005 - 2007
Added new features to existing in-house software as needed.
- Created Web 2.0 list/tag system
- video thumbnail extraction with mplayer
- streaming video transcoding infrastructure with ffmpeg and jwplayer, custom PHP content delivery network with distributed zip file creation and on-demand image watermarking
- maintenance of pre-production and post-production database systems
- MySQL optimization including query, schema, and server optimization
Consultant at G Media Pty Ltd, Urbana, Illinois, United States
2004 - 2005
Created customizable HR/pre-production database with MySQL and Perl. This was a bespoke highly customizable web application for tracking pre-production planning.
Festival Director at Porcupine Mountains Music Festival, Ontonagon County, Michigan, United States
2005 - 2007
Created a 3 day folk music festival in a state park in rural Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I was the sole paid employee responsible for creation, talent booking, site logistics, web site design, budgeting, marketing, and coordination of over 100 volunteers.
This was a 25% time job. The festival continues to operate annually after over 15 years.
Co-Founder at Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network, Urbana, Illinois, United States
2004 - 2005
Non-profit, grant-funded, initiative to implement a mesh wireless routing protocol called Hazy-Sighted Link State (HSLS). I helped specify the overall architecture, administered the testing platform, performed field installations, and developed network visualization and configuration software in C. I was a technical representative for the project at conferences in Seattle, Washington DC, and Denmark and in meetings at the Federal Communication Commission and with several US Congresspeople.
Systems Engineer at National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Champaign, Illinois, United States
2001 - 2004
Manage servers for Hierarchical Data Format group and Caterpillar research group including HPUX, Solaris, Linux, IRIX, and Windows machines. Problem solver for research groups with special computing needs not otherwise met by the normal support structure.
Chief Technology Officer at Slots.com, Urbana, Illinois, United States
2000 - 2001
Dotcom startup with an early vision of interactive advertising. In the days of banner ads this company sought to replace banner ads with interactive slot machine games that would reward engaged prospective customers with coupons to drive impressions to conversions more efficiently. I created the Java applet based web front end as well as the Apache/Perl based server backend. I also specified, acquired, and maintained the server infrastructure.
Software Developer at Zach Miller Consulting, Urbana, Illinois, United States
1999 - 2001
Various clients. Developed C++/Apache integration for a C++ web application framework. Developed modular Perl-based "meta-search" engine for educational purposes - parsing and comparing search results from multiple search engines.
Lead Programmer at US Geological Survey, Urbana, Illinois, United States
1995 - 1999
Web programmer and software engineer for the Illinois District of the Water Resources Division. Designed and built a modular system for distributing real-time stream gauge data to the public including both CSV/TSV files and graphs. Our team was one of the first government agencies to put real time data on the Web. I was lead programmer on a team of seven. I was also involved in system administration within the Illinois district and at the national headquarters.
Network Systems Administrator at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Aurora, Illinois, United States
1993 - 1995
Lead Solaris and Netware systems administrator. My duties included maintenance, upgrade, and development of several networked machines with a user base of over 1000 users. Implementation of one of the earliest school websites. Member of a 3 person team which designed and installed a Solaris and Netware server cluster for the students and faculty of IMSA. Played a leading role in designing a campus wide ethernet LAN with several hundred drops, several subnets, multiple protocol support, and a high speed server backbone. Assisted in hiring process for full time system administrators. Coordinated student network system administrator program. Maintained a collection of open source tools.
Education
BS Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1995 - 2000
BA Linguistics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1995 - 2000
High School from Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
1993 - 1995
References
Clinton Popetz
President/CTO at Harmonize / 42 Lines, Inc
Zach is a very deep thinker, a person who takes the time necessary to consider all aspects of a problem and is able to analyze the costs and benefits of possible solutions. His attention to detail is unmatched. He was a crucial and valuable member of our team for many years in various roles, and his contributions were always welcome. He's also an extremely ethical, thoughtful, and empathetic human, which makes him an excellent addition to any team regardless of his specific role.
Marcus Popetz
CEO at Harmonize / 42 Lines, Inc
Zach was a great human being to work with both in his ability to think about a problem from sides I hadn't even considered but also for considering the ethical and human aspect of all problems as well.
Professional Skills
Agile Development (Expert)
Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), Distributed Teams, ScrumMaster, Retrospectives, Burndown, Velocity, Planning, Commitment, Points, Stories, Pairing
Project Management (Expert)
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Ticketing Systems, Workflows, Human Resource Allocation, Estimation, Retrospective, Continuous Improvement, Projections, Portfolio Management
MySQL (Expert)
Query Optimization, Index Optimization, ETL, Database Administrator (DBA), Schema Design, Data Modeling
Revenue Operations (RevOps) (Expert)
Salesforce, HubSpot, DocuSign, CRM, Integration, Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), FreshDesk, Reporting, Forecasting, Sales Process
Atlassian Suite (Expert)
JIRA, Confluence, Crown, Fisheye/Crucible, Trello
WordPress (Proficient)
Admin, Customization, Elementor, Plugins, Themes
Systems and Network Administration (Proficient)
Linux, Security, Reliability, DevOps, AWS, Firewall, LAN, Routing
Containerization (Competent)
Docker, OpenShift, Kubernetes
Full Stack Web Development (Expert)
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Responsive Design, Accessibility, Bootstrap
Hiring Process (Expert)
Recruiting, Job Description, Pre-Screen, Interview, Practical Test
PHP (Expert)
Zend Certified Engineer, PHP5, PHP7, Doctrine ORM
Salesforce.com (Expert)
Apex, Workflows, Process Builder, Lightning, Integration, Migration, RevOps
Web Services (Expert)
REST, SOAP, JSON, Integration, Authentication, API, RSS
Jekyll (Proficient)
Static Website, JSON, Liquid
C++ (Proficient)
STL, C++98
Java (Competent)
Business Intelligence (BI) (Expert)
SQL, Tableau, Google Sheets, Data Analysis, Reporting, ETL, OLAP, Normalization, Denormalization, Database Administrator (DBA)
Software Development (Expert)
Patterns, YAGNI, DRY, OOP, Perl, Python, PHP, Security, Model/View/Controller (MVC), Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing, Deployment, Support, Updates, Reliability, Performance, Security
Perl (Expert)
Modern Perl, Embedding, mod_perl, CPAN
HubSpot Marketing Hub (Expert)
Workflows, Automation, Configuration, Administration, Integration, Campaigns, Sync
Digital Video (Expert)
ffmpeg, mplayer, transcoding, MediaCapture, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), AWS MediaConvert, Closed Captioning, Subtitles
XML (Proficient)
Extensible Stylesheets (XSL), XSL Transformations (XSLT), XML Path Language (XPath), XML Schema (XSD)
Git (Proficient)
Branch, Merge, Hooks, Diff, Blame, Rebase
Python (Competent)