Bruce M. Van Horn II, ACSM - Software & DevOps Professional

Installation

            $  brew install bruce-van-horn-2
            $  apt-get install bruce-van-horn=2.0.0
            $ choco install bruce-van-horn-2

Highly Experienced

I have over 30 years of industry experience. I've written everything from military flight simulators to desktop, mobile, and web apps. For the last 12 years, I've been working on Visual One Intelligence as the principal software engineer.

Visual One Intelligence is an analytics application designed to ingest data from corporate IT infrastructure. Through an extract-transform-load process these ingested data move through a data pipeline making their way to several databases and a data warehouse.

The overall system is implemented as a set of microservices hosted in Azure. The Azure environment is managed using Terraform and Ansible.

The front-end was created using React, ag-grid, and Highcharts. The application features AI components from Azure and IBM WatsonX.

Naturally, I am hand-on and well versed with this entire array of technology.

In addition to the technical stuff, I also manage the development staff and the department budget. I'm responsible for hiring team members and developing their skills.

Legendary Mentor

I have literally taught tens of thousands of people to code via my video publications. I have taught professionally for over 20 years (severally) at Collin College, Dallas College, and Southern Methodist University. My students have gone on to work at companies like IBM, Amazon, and major game development studios.

I'm super-proud of the students I've taught in person since most of them come to learn with no prior IT or development experience. My favorite examples include a former baker (now works at Amazon), a paint salesman (now works at a major bank as a lead developer), a policeman (now works as a cybersecurity consultant for a major firm), and a candle-shop manager (now as a full-stack developer working for me).

Award Winning

I don't usually brag, but this is basically a resume. Bragging is pretty much the whole point. Here goes:

2020 SDC Awards - Storage Management Innovation of the Year
2016 Innovator of the Year, Clear Technologies
2016 'Top 10 Most Promising Storage Products' in 2016 by CIO Magazine
2011 United States Navy IS&T Award

Published

I have written two books for Packt. I have also produced many training videos for bona fide publishers.

Van Horn, B., II, & Nguyen, Q. (2023). Hands-On Application Development with PyCharm 2nd Edition. Packt Publishing.
Van Horn, B. M., II, & Symons, V. (2022). Real-World Implementation of C# Design Patterns: Overcome daily programming challenges using elements of reusable object-oriented software. Packt Publishing.
Van Horn, B. M., II. (2019) Building RESTful APIs with Flask. LinkedIn Learning.
Van Horn, B. M., II. (2018) C# Essential Training: 1 Syntax and Object-Oriented Programming. LinkedIn Learning.
Van Horn, B. M., II. (2018) C# Essential Training: 2 Flow Control, Arrays, and Exception Handling. LinkedIn Learning.
Van Horn, B. M., II. (2017) Learning Python with PyCharm. LinkedIn Learning.
Van Horn, B. M., II. (2017) Unity 5 Network Gaming. LinkedIn Learning.
Van Horn, B. M., II. (2015) Introduction to Xamarin for .NET. SkillSoft.
Van Horn, B. M., II. (2015) Android User Interface Elements. SkillSoft.
Van Horn, B. M., II. (2015) Android for .NET Developers: Advanced Topics 1. SkillSoft.

Employment Changelog (Most recent 3 iterations)

Download Resume (latest build)

Visual Storage One Intelligence (Clear Technologies)

Principal Software Engineer / Advanced Certified Scrum Master

2013-Present

I worked to establish the company's AI strategy and worked directly to implement LLM features leveraging offerings from Microsoft Azure and IBM WatsonX.
During the first 8 years of my tenure, I successfully established and managed the entire system's infrastructure using Ubuntu Linux, Microsoft Server, Redis, MongoDB, VMWare ESX, and Docker, including a complete CI / CD DevOps tool chain based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products.
Two years ago I began migrating everything to Microsoft Azure using Terraform and Ansible. Today our product is hosted completely in Azure.
I architected and configured continuous integration (CI) builds and continuous deployment (CD) deployments using Team City, Octopus Deploy, Subversion, Git, GitHub, and BitBucket. This was migrated to Azure DevOps when we moved to Azure.
I worked as part of a management team towards achieving SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.
As an Advanced Certified Scrum Master (A-CSM), I successfully leveraged Scrum and Kanban agile principles in planning releases, projecting daily work, negotiating with stakeholders over priority, and I kept junior developers accountable for release targets. I lead daily Scrum meetings, increment demos, and retrospectives.
I designed and developed the systems and software architecture for the current product and wrote 80% of the code for the initial releases in Python (Flask). For subsequent releases, and maintenance, I hired and developed a team of 8 developers and data scientists.
I have extensive UI/UX experience and developed our product's UI using modern JavaScript with React.
I have contributed heavily to development projects using C# .NET, C# .NET Core, Python 3, Flask, FastAPI, JavaScript / ECMAScript 6, Express, Fastify, React, Mongoose, MongoDB, Redis and SQL Server.
I implemented event queues using Azure Service Bus, Redis, and RabbitMQ to track system telemetry in real time.
I create and tune SQL Server queries, indexes, and stored procedures. I also directly manage our Azure SQL databases.
I served as the front-line penetration tester for our product. I worked with third-party penetration testing firms to validate my security design and implementation.
I personally created the secure infrastructure for our APIs and web services leveraging the Nginx web server and reverse proxy software.
I created and maintained our software development lifecycle (SDLC) documentation, change control procedures, and track the development team's key performance indicators (KPIs).
I migrated appropriate software components from virtual machines to Docker.
In 2022, I was awarded my company's Clearly Exceptional award in recognition for my ongoing work in bringing the VSI production from startup to being profitable.
My work won the 2020 SDC Award for Storage Management Innovation of the Year in recognition of my team's production of the only product in its class that supports over 50 different heterogenous IT platforms.
My work won the 'Best Capacity Management' category awarded by EMA Radar in 2017 after I created a feature set around enterprise storage capacity management alongside a junior developer whom I was mentoring.
I was awarded 'Innovator of the Year', 2016 by Clear Technologies in recognition of my data warehouse design and implementation intitiatives which drastically improved application performance and customer satisfaction. This award is rarely given, and is not presented annually, but only when a big contribution is made.
My product was awarded 'Top 10 Most Promising Storage Products' in 2016 by CIO Magazine.

Southern Methodist University

Lead Instructor, SMU Full Stack Code Bootcamp

2017 - Present

Delivered engaging course lectures
Facilitated in-class exercises
We teach the Mongo, Express, React, Node (MERN) stack in a comprehensive six-month course.
Managed 2-4 teaching assistants depending on enrollment.
Consistently maintained a net promoter score over 80% (one of the highest in the US).
Sneaked my family into SMU football games using my otherwise legit parking pass on weekends when I wasn't teaching.

ACCESS Systems

Lead Developer, Marine Ammunition Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE)

2011 - 2013

Developed custom extensions for the DotNetNuke (DNN) content management system
Developed SQL queries in TSQL to support development efforts
Mentored Junior Developers
Won the Navy’s IS&T award for outstanding contributions to the US Navy’s IT operations

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