Work
Six systems, and what changed.
These are the projects I’d point at in an interview. Every one of them was a system already carrying real traffic, which is the only interesting kind of constraint.
Health Recovery Solutions
Tech Lead & Architect
2024 – 2026
Backend architecture for a healthcare outcomes platform
Promoted from senior developer to own backend architecture and technical direction for the platform’s most recent phase, running a team of up to five engineers.
- What I built
- PHP Lumen microservices plus a set of reusable PSR‑4 packages (api‑parser, crud‑service, metrics) so new services stopped re‑solving the same three problems.
- How the team ran
- ADR‑based decisions, so the reasoning behind a choice outlived the sprint it was made in. Code review and engineering coordination across the group.
- Why it mattered
- Shared packages plus written‑down decisions are what let five people work in parallel without three of them quietly disagreeing about the same interface.
“Richard had an exceptional understanding of the platform and could navigate even the most complex parts of the system with confidence.”
Usama (Sam) Inam, QA Lead at Health Recovery Solutions
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Health Recovery Solutions
Senior Developer
2020 – 2024
Complete warehousing system rewrite
Architected, designed and implemented the replacement for the existing warehousing system, building the original architecture from the ground up.
- The constraint
- A warehouse does not stop. Whatever replaced the old system had to run alongside it and take over without a gap in fulfillment.
- What I built
- An architecture deliberately shaped so the ERP underneath was swappable, which is what later enabled a near‑seamless migration from NetSuite to Stratix.
- Why it mattered
- The migration was the payoff, but the decision that made it cheap was taken years earlier: not letting NetSuite’s shape leak into every caller.
Health Recovery Solutions
Tech Lead & Architect
2024 – 2026
Event-driven shipment monitoring
Designed and integrated a UPS monitoring system with event‑driven actions on top of the logistics platform.
- What I built
- Real‑time shipment tracking, automated event triggers, and the notification pipelines hanging off them, in Laravel.
- Why it mattered
- Carrier state changes stopped being something a person had to go look up. The event arrives, the right thing happens, and the people who care get told.
Dell EMC
Advisor, IT Development
2017 – 2020
Data-driven internal CMS, built from zero
Primary architect and de‑facto systems analyst on an internal content platform: schemas, ingestion cycles, front and back end separation, and the conventions the team worked to.
- What I built
- An ACL package with an Angular GUI for fine‑grained role and permission tuning, and a custom cron manager that replaced editing crontabs by hand.
- Delivery
- Dockerized the application and stood up Jenkins CI for automated builds, then coordinated release structure across an outside vendor and the internal dev team.
- Why it mattered
- Permissions and scheduled jobs are where internal tools rot first. Both got a real interface instead of a tribal‑knowledge one.
“…invaluable in helping to coordinate the transfer of large amounts of data and present them in a organized, logical manner via API.”
Sudheer Parvithina, managed Richard at Dell EMC
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gen.video
Senior Developer
2012 – 2017
Proprietary CMS decoupled into services
Architected the overhaul of gen.video’s proprietary CMS into a service‑oriented architecture, on Laravel and MySQL with Eloquent, without taking the legacy platform offline.
- Search
- Designed the Elasticsearch index mappings, faceted search and query optimization over large video metadata sets. That layer became the platform’s core discovery and filtering engine.
- The bridge
- Built an SDK so new services could talk to the legacy system over REST. That is what made incremental migration possible instead of a big bang.
- Also shipped
- ACL, workflow, audit and dynamic page solutions, an event‑based triggering system for cross‑platform communication, a timed events queue, and help moving the platform to AWS.
“…taking the time to understand the true business problem and goals for the code. He’d then build flexible frameworks that solved not only the current challenge but the next ones likely to appear.”
Bill Hildebolt, Co-founder, gen.video
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eFashion Solutions
Senior Web Developer
2007 – 2012
eCommerce platform re-architecture and PCI migration
Core member of a three‑person team that took the eCommerce platform from procedural PHP to object‑oriented on Zend Framework, for SaaS delivery.
- Payments
- Integrated Authorize.net, PayPal, Amazon, Google Checkout and AvaTax, and rewrote the ACL framework along with the client admin and content portal.
- Compliance
- Migrated the infrastructure from PHP 4 to PHP 5 for PCI compliance, and introduced AJAX plus JSON for cross‑language communication.
- Why it mattered
- A compliance deadline is the one kind of rewrite you cannot negotiate the date on. It shipped.
“…without much supervision, he has integrated with not only multiple payment methods such as clients’ private label credit cards but also with a very complex retail sales auditing system.”
Michael Sanfiorenzo, senior colleague at eFashion Solutions
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