Davis W. Frank
I am an experienced senior software engineering leader with a demonstrated history of helping software teams shorten feedback loops, ship software, and stay happy. I can manage developers, designers, product managers, and people managers. I can build and re-staff teams. I can own critical business systems and start open source projects. I can present to meetups, conferences, customers, and executives about Ruby, JavaScript, YAML, Web Applications, early history of PC game development, low-level processor optimization, Pair Programming, and Test-driven Development.
Professional Experience Timeline
Fountain October 2021 - June 2023
Director of Software Engineering
- Improved release frequency of main Rails application from 3x/month to 4x/week, a more resilient process that reduced hotfixes from 3x/week to under 2x/month.
- Rebuilt, centralized, and standardized engineer hiring process: improved hired ratio, increased staff diversity, and raised talent bar.
- Managed teams of ~25 remote engineers and managers across review cycles, re-orgs, and layoffs.
- Teams included Product Development, Data Engineering, Release Engineering, and Cloud Engineering.
- Managed cost and contracts with vendors (e.g., AWS, Azure, Heroku, CircleCI, GCP/Looker, and others).
Personal Sabbatical & Product Advising January 2020 - October 2021
- Collaborated on the software engineering simulation at Curious Duck. Built in Ruby on Rails.
- Advised Bigger Bolder Baking on Wordpress vendor selection for improving their CMS.
- Rebuilt my personal website and blogged on software engineering topics.
Pivotal Software & Pivotal Labs April 2008 - January 2020
Senior Software Engineering Manager, PKS October 2018 - January 2020
PKS (now known as TKGI) is a jointly-developed Kubernetes distribution from Pivotal & VMware that is a service for Pivotal Cloud Foundry/Tanzu Application Service. Pivotal was acquired by VMware in late 2019.
- Reported to VP of Engineering as part of leadership and management team.
- Staffed team of 12 developers in the US as we moved the project from Ireland.
- Lead summer intern round table.
- Managed team through VMware acquisition uncertainty.
- Defined and prioritized CI/CD work for the Release Engineering team of 10 developers.
- Doubled the number of concurrent releases from 2 to 4.
- Reduced pull request cycle time from 4 days to less than 1.
- Team worked in Ruby and YAML across AWS, GCP, Azure, and vSphere.
Senior Software Engineering Manager, Cloud Foundry April 2018 - October 2018
Pivotal was the primary sponsor of the Cloud Foundry project, a multi-cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for deployment of web apps and services. Pivotal sold its own version of CF, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, now known as Tanzu Application Service.
- Developer on OSS “Cloud API” team; Ruby on Rails and Sinatra codebase.
- Managed 4 engineers on other teams.
- Facilitated weekly managers’ skills coaching sessions.
- Rebuilt the summer intern experience in San Francisco, hosting a weekly intern round table with Pivotal leaders.
Director of Software Engineering, Internal Application Development March 2015 - March 2018
I advocated for and created this team within IT to improve the development & maintenance of our business-critical, internal software projects.
- Staffed team to 15 engineers, product managers, and designers in San Francisco and Toronto.
- Drove budgeting and prioritization exercises with executive staff and other organization leaders.
- Key projects: Employee Feedback app, Staff Allocations app + integrations with back office, Software APIs and infrastructure for sales reporting, Discovery for corporate SAP-to-Workday transition prior to IPO, Discovery for Customer Support tooling.
Associate Director, Pivotal Labs February 2013 - March 2015
Pivotal Labs was a consultancy that build web and mobile applications with clients as a way of teaching XP skills. Pivotal Labs was acquired by EMC in 2012, then spun out as part of Pivotal Software in 2013. They operate now as VMware Tanzu Labs.
- Managed staff of 40 developers and 5 managers, about one-third of the the San Francisco consulting practice.
- Facilitated client scopings and wrote proposals as part of pre-sales motion.
- Managed 3-5 concurrent client projects, including staff adjustments and extensions, keeping clients happy.
- Scheduled “beach” time for 8 Pivotal Labs open source projects across multiple offices.
- Presented at conferences, meetups, and clients about Pivotal, Extreme Programming, and testing JavaScript.
Software Engineering Manager, Pivotal Labs February 2010 - February 2013
- Founding member of the first manager cohort; established and modeled initial management practices.
- Managed 10 developers across consulting projects.
- Continued to lead engagements as engineering “anchor” for client projects.
- Presented at conferences, meetups, and clients about Pivotal, Extreme Programming, and testing JavaScript.
Software Engineer, Pivotal Labs April 2008 - February 2010
- Lead engagements as engineering “anchor” for numerous client projects.
- Taught client developers Ruby on Rails and XP practices, including pair programming and test-driven development.
- Co-created Jasmine, an innovative BDD framework for JavaScript testing to improve front-end development.
Senior Software Engineer
RGM built a custom CMS in Ruby on Rails, intended to back a family of web-only magazines. They were acquired in 2009.
- Lead engineer on the development team of 8 for Divine Caroline, a web-only, women’s interest magazine.
- Worked with internal Product Management on feature feasibility and estimation.
- Improved CI run from 2 hours to under 45 minutes over 4 weeks while still shipping new features.
Personal Sabbatical June 2006 - February 2007
- Taught myself Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and just enough SQL.
Handspring & Palm November 2001 - June 2006
Handspring was acquired by PalmSource and renamed to palmOne in 2003. They renamed again to Palm in 2004.
- Software Engineering Manager, Device Customization and In-box CD-ROM teams
- Reduced smartphone manufacturing final programming from 1.5 hours to 3 minutes.
- Designed & managed implementation of new XML-based carrier customization system.
- Moved In-box shared MacOS/Windows CD from weekly to daily builds.
- Managed team of 8 engineers.
- Engineering Program Manager, Messaging & Photos Applications
- Led prioritization and implementation for these apps for Treo 600 and Treo 650 smartphones.
- Managed external vendors for MMS, Imaging, and Photo driver libraries.
- Reduced “click-to-1st-photo” time from 3.5 seconds to under 1 second.
- Software Engineering Manager, Tools
- Managed team of 5 developers developing PalmOS SDK for all of Handspring devices.
- Launched a Mozilla/Bugzilla-based bug tracking web app & migrated company from custom bug database.
Prior Experience
My history of roles and accomplishments at Netstudio, Brøderbund, and Intel are available in my full resume.
Education
B.S., Computer Science, July 1992
General Management class and electives, since fall 2017
Projects & Activities
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