James McNeice

Experience

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  University of Alberta

  May 2009 - Aug 2009

  CS Summer Camp Instructor, Department of Computing Science
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  University of Alberta

  May 2010 - Jun 2012

  Web/Database Developer & Technical Support, Faculty of Science

  - Was the point of within the Dean's Office for technical requests and instruction on new technologies.- Was given a great level of independence and used it during my two years to extend the position from routine maintenance and support to being an instructor for staff in new technologies.- Established a system of reserve computers so that even in cases of sudden hardware failure staff would have a new system up and running in an hour maximum- Developed a simple online room booking system using Perl accessing Google calendars which were already in common office use. This allowed those outside the Faculty Office to book our conference rooms without changing the work flow of anyone inside the office. Show less

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  Invidi Technologies

  Jan 2013 - Jan 2014

  Interim Emulation Team Lead

  - Led a team with two local developers and two remote developers performing scale testing on the Advatar system and developing the emulation and simulation tools required to do so. - Set the project specifications, broke down projects in to tasks that could be completed in parallel, assigned tasks, and acted as lead developer. - The team extended and maintained a number of emulation tools (C++) as well as a large scale system (100k lines+ of Perl) for setting up the Advatar database and retrieving information from it. Show less

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  GE Intelligent Platforms

  Aug 2014 - Mar 2015

  Continuous Integration Consultant

  - Developed a plugin for TeamCity that used Chef and Hyper-V to create customized, temporary, VM's for individual tests.- Created a system using NodeJS allowing users to request a customized VM from a web page. The VM was automatically created using Hyper-V and Chef. Customizations included the OS installed, OS settings, programs installed, and the creation of various files and folders. These VM's allowed for consistent and reproducible testing environments for QA. - Primary technologies were NodeJS, Hyper-V, and Chef. Show less

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  McNeice Software

  Apr 2015 - May 2017

  Primary Developer

  - I created virtual reality experiences for the Occulus Rift with a focus on user comfort and minimizing VR sickness. - Developed, “Stardew Fisher”, to automate fishing in the game Stardew Valley. Used .NET to capture the screen, image recognition with OpenCV to isolate the relevant game elements, machine learning via Math.NET to make decisions, and .NET to send input back to Stardew Valley. - Developed, “Castle Invader”, a rail-based shooter in UE4 focused on comfort while using an Oculus Rift. By holding the player stationary during each scene, cutting to a third person camera to show the character moving, and cutting back after movement we were able to eliminate sickness from forced motion.- Developed a series of VR experiences in UE4 manipulating forced motion, presence of fixed HUD, placement of UI elements, teleportation, and movement rates to better understand what causes VR sickness in different people- Primary technologies were C#, C++11, UE4, and Unity. Show less

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  Legal Aid Alberta

  May 2017 - Feb 2020

  Systems Analyst

  - Responsible for developing and supporting a wide range of in-house applications including a legal invoicing web application, internal tools built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and custom call centre built on Cisco UCCX/CUCM.- Redeveloped the lawyer matching algorithm reducing the run time from three minutes to under one second. This represented a time savings of over 150 hours each month.- Developed an internal react-based website that integrated with UCCX to gather information from call centre agents and link it to call data. This provided in-depth reporting on call centre activity and automatic detection of unusual trends. - Established coding standards and best practices and got them adopted by the team.- Primary technologies were C#, .NET Core, SQL, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Cisco UCCX, Legal Files, and React. Show less

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  SAM | The Real-Time Knowledge Engine

  Jun 2020 - now

  Infrastructure and Security Lead

  - Working on a pipeline to detect events in real time using a mixture of social media and other web data sources.- Improved the performance of the pipeline at scale by identifying performance bottlenecks and refactoring to solve them. My changes reduced the load during normal periods which reduced AWS costs by more than 50%. They also increased maximum throughput which allowed handling extreme, and sudden, spikes in volume.- Converted the AWS environment to be maintained and deployed using Terraform. Having infrastructure as code made it possible to quickly iterate on the environment decreasing AWS costs and improving reliability.- Taught other team members how to use Terraform promoting a culture of DevOps.- Responsible for ensuring our uptime guarantee by proactively identifying points of failure, implementing monitoring, and creating metrics to measure all parts of the system.- Lead the SOC2 initiative establishing policies, controls, and evidence gathering around processing integrity, security, confidentiality, privacy, and availability while maintaining an agile methodology.- Primary technologies were Python, NodeJS, MongoDB, AWS, Terraform, and Docker. Show less