Alexander Dorn
Software Artisan
Software engineering veteran with 19 years of professional experience in different areas and companies of all sizes. Highly specialized in Platform Engineering, Engineering Leadership, Recruitment, Agile Coaching and Functional Programming methodologies. Excellent team multiplier and extremely eager to both learn and teach new techniques and technologies. Linux operating system expert with a high Red Hat / Fedora and GNU Emacs affinity.
Joined forces with the Dixa SRE team to standardize and unify the platforms of all joined companies.
Ported Solvemate's Drone CI pipelines to Dixa's standard GitHub Actions solution.
Added crucial missing features to Dixa's custom infrastructure-as-code solution based on Pulumi and TypeScript to support GitHub Actions with Kubernetes clusters in different regions and environments.
Migrated Solvemate's legacy chatbot stack from GCP to AWS while porting functionality from Helm charts to Pulumi.
Leadership of the newly founded Automation Platform team after Solvemate's acquisition through Dixa with an "engineering teams as customers" focus.
Successfully ported the legacy CI environment and its pipelines to a Drone based solution and guided the team to empower the customer experience teams develop locally.
Championed and completed the Google Workspace migration project.
Took on the responsibility to manage all engineers as well as engineering processes and put in charge of tech recruitment.
Established agile development practices and coding standards that ensured delivery teams were empowered to deliver valuable features first and foremost while staying unblocked.
Containerized the existing platform in collaboration with with the SRE Lead, enabling autoscaling and safe automatic rollbacks through Kubernetes on Google Cloud.
As part of a delivery team, implemented asynchronous channel integration successfully for four different providers by providing a new Python backend.
Helped create a new onboarding experience from scratch by extending the existing Python services and Angular frontend.
Increased developer satisfaction and effectiveness by 20% through coaching and regular surveys.
Led the tech recruitment efforts to success by hiring three new colleagues through extensive interviewing.
Coordinated training and certification program for Scrum Masters and Product Owners, resulting in increase in team productivity.
Served as Scrum Master and Agile Coach for multiple teams, increasing overall team independence, happiness and efficiency.
Managing Director and sole engineer of a B2B DevOps as a Service company, part of a group of companies.
Modernized all legacy Ruby and PHP services for the other shareholders' companies by porting them into Docker Stack environments.
Established and maintained custom IDP-backed mail and file hosting solution using FreeIPA, Nextcloud, and Postfix.
Developed an innovative, Linux distribution independent monitoring and security analysis solution using Nix, Prometheus, and Snyk.
Upgraded a legacy SSL certificate provider system written in PHP to support S/MIME.
Freelancing JavaScript SDK developer for the æternity blockchain. All contributions are Free Software and can be scrutinized publicly.
Took over the lead for the JavaScript SDK and modernized it in close collaboration with the core blockchain development team.
Also contributed minor parts to the backend Erlang API.
Assumed the role of Berlin Hub Lead after the acquisition of LShift through Oliver Wyman (Marsh & McLennan Companies).
Ensured the smooth transition for the former LShift development team in Germany.
Successfully lead an effort to develop a custom, corporate-level approved Enterprise Linux distribution based on Fedora and Red Hat for development teams.
Supported Account Executives to win several sales pitches.
Joined the Managing Director to build up the new German satellite team for London-based LShift, a former FinTech agency specialized in Functional Programming.
Assumed the lead for an almost-failed private social network project that was based on Clojure, TypeScript and Event Sourcing and saved the customer from churning by fixing the technical issues, which also involved a migration from Heroku to AWS.
Adopted another project at risk of churning for a UK pro-bono platform that involved AngularJS, Python and Salt based deployment strategies.
Implemented rammler, the world's first AMQP 0.9.1 proxy, the protocol used by recent versions of the RabbitMQ message broker.
Set up and maintained infrastructure, cloud setup and services for the company using FreeIPA and GSuite.
Provided support for RabbitMQ consulting.
With the previous project successfully rolled out, switched over to the Search Analytics division to become a member of the research-savvy Recommendations team.
Employed Hadoop MapReduce with Cascalog on AWS to answer complex queries the existing tooling couldn't handle, resulting in great improvements of the UX in response to observations.
Developed a web application for A/B testing search result quality from scratch using Knockout and D3 that was rolled out to hundreds of external helpers and resulted in higher search precision.
Optimized the Java-based Search engine to be run locally without having to use Cloud capabilities.
After completing the previous project, changed to the new NMAA team that delivered Windows Phone native integration for Nokia's native maps stack, MOS, in direct collaboration with Microsoft.
Successfully supported the team by building test frameworks, build pipelines and debugging capabilities into Windows Phone source code. Ultimately, all code was shipped as part of Windows Phone 7.5 onwards.
Implemented a custom Test Anything Protocol harness for collaboration with Microsoft from scratch in F#.
Joined Nokia's Maps on MeeGo team as Senior Software Engineer.
Successfully delivered the Qt/QML-based Maps on MeeGo application for the last pure Nokia smartphone, the N9, with a strong focus on places logic as well as being in charge for the user data synchronization. Contributed most of its offline maps downloader in C++.
Junior PHP developer for a pre-smartphone era mobile web development company.
Complemented the existing Perl mobile web technology stack with a PHP framework that enabled other developers use the existing stack with a more familiar approach, significantly speeding up overall development.
Developed various mobile web front-ends using Prototype, an early JavaScript framework, and later jQuery.
Delivered a Perl-based mail responder system for a luxury clothes brand.
Implemented countless mobile web services from scratch using PHP and the in-house markup languange.
Delivered a custom PHP-based CMS system to Microsoft for maintaining their mobile XBox website.
Joined as an sofware engineering apprentice, ultimately earned vocational degree.
Implemented a custom time tracking system that enabled all company employees to track their flexible working hours with ASP.NET in C#.
Complemented the time tracking system with a SharePoint add-in in C# that provided quick access to every employee's time tracking account.
Collaborated with a university student to store CATIA V5 CAD data into SAP R/3 recursively in ABAP/4, ultimately helping him graduate successfully.
Successfully wrote an Outlook add-in from scratch in C# that enabled users store individual mails into SAP R/3.
Used Java and SVG plotting to implement a graph library from scratch and integrated it with SAP NetWeaver using Java Portlets.
Obtained certification as Computer Science Expert after 2.5 years of studying and working in parallel with a perfect score for the practical exam. Qualifies as ISCED 4.
Obtained certification for Agile Project Management using the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), an agile project delivery framework.
Undertook extensive Scrum.org training to become a certified Scrum Master.