Kevin Kolz

SchoolMint acquired Whetstone at the beginning of 2021, and I transitioned from CTO to the Senior Director of Engineering for the positive classroom line of products, including Grow (formerly Whetstone), Hero, and Schoolrunner. I am now responsible for overseeing the development/maintenance of 5 web applications, 8 APIs, 3 mobile apps, and all the cloud infrastructure required to run these systems.

In my current role, I provide technical leadership to the engineering teams and mentorship to individual developers. My primary responsibilities in this role are growing the team, enabling each team member to be as productive as possible, ensuring the classroom products are built to the highest standards and are able to scale in order to meet the demand of our rapidly expanding customer base.

As the CTO of Whetstone I was responsible for the entire Whetstone platform and development team. I actively wrote code, built & maintained the cloud infrastructure, as well as hired/managed a team of developers. Upon joining Whetstone I inherited a very large monolithic application with a ton of technical debt. I spent my first 2 years rewriting the entire platform. This involved re-writing the application in Typescript/Angular/Node, transitioning from single tenant to multi-tenancy, as well as moving the cloud infrastructure from Heroku to Google Cloud. Whetstone is now hosted in an auto-scaled, load-balanced, Kubernetes cluster that I built and actively maintain.

In addition to building and maintaining the platform I also grew the development team from 2 to 6 developers. I was responsible for hiring, mentoring, and managing the team while actively contributing code alongside them. Every developer on the team worked as a full stack contributor, including myself. We successfully launched the new Whetstone platform mid-school year in the winter of 2020/2021. Later that year the company was acquired, in large part due to our success building a highly stable, scalable, maintainable platform.

Lead engineer for GE Digital Services. My team was responsible for building applications that empower GE employees to create, track, and maintain digital representations of GE Power plant assets. I worked closely with the product owners from GE Power to build custom interactive charts & graphs designed to assist engineers responsible for carrying out predictive maintenance on power plant equipment. Our application was built using Angular for the UI, as well as two APIs implemented in Spring Boot.

In addition to the responsibilities I had to my team, I actively contributed to the GE "open source" community to build reusable software components that can be shared across all of GE Digital. I also participated in the Nola Guilds, which are groups setup to spread knowledge and educate GE developers on technologies and frameworks.

At Qonceptual I was responsible for the entire software delivery process. I interfaced with clients who were interested in doing business with Qonceptual to determine project requirements and the feasibility of the product. I worked a multitude of projects, sometimes on a team, sometimes solo. Every project I have worked on, I have contributed code to every layer of the application. I actively built APIs, web applications, and deployed/maintained applications in Amazon AWS.

The most recent project I built at Qonceptual was PinScout. This application is comprised of 3 APIs; 1 for delivering content to the consumer facing applications, 1 for payment processing using Stripe, and 1 for handling beacons, geofences, and push notifications. I also built 2 web applications; 1 for consumers and 1 for the PinScout admins to manage CMS content. I hosted all of these applications using Amazon AWS.

My main strength and focus at Qonceptual has been on Javascript engineering. Whether it be Angular/React or Node, I believe Javascript is one of the most powerful languages available for rapid prototyping, which has been my main focus for the past year.

At Sparc I was primarily responsible for migrating a monolithic government application from an antiquated jquery web application over to AngularJS. I was given full autonomy to make this effort happen outside of normal processes and was able to deliver a convincing argument to make the move to Angular for the entire project after 2 months of effort. I converted the National Work Queue application over to Angular while it was being actively developed by dozens of engineers. This required me to always stay one step ahead of all the other developers who were on the project for an extended period of time to get the job done.

I was also responsible for a sizable portion of the analytics framework for the Veterans Benefit Management System. This was a complex data mining application responsible for querying and aggregating data from a multitude of systems and displaying meaningful graphical representations to the customers at the Veterans Administration. I was responsible for a majority of the UI while also actively developing on the Java API.

At Updox I was responsible for rewriting an antiquated UI in Angular as well as maintaining the existing application. The applications at Updox were responsible for electronic faxing, patient facing portal, direct encrypted email for practices, and patient payment processing, to name a few. This application was highly complex and required to meet HIPAA standards.

• Rebuilt a legacy web application using modern frameworks
• Built application framework using AngularJS
• Utilized semantic-ui for UI components and style

• Built a Ruby on Rails web application for American Express Travel
• Worked primarily on front end JavaScript using jQuery and Backbone.js
• Built templates from mock-ups using HAML and Handlebars
• Styled templates using SCSS
• Implemented Rails Controllers/Models
• Used Google Protocol Buffers for serializing data
• Wrote APIs in Node.js and Ruby
• Used Zeromq for inter-process communication

Worked with all levels of the JEE technology stack to build applications using the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm

• Worked with all levels of the JEE technology stack to build applications using the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm
• Developed multiple solutions using the Java Persistence API
• Used JavaServer Pages with JavaScript and jQuery to create dynamic web content
• Worked with numerous open source libraries
• Used the Spring framework for dependency injection, aspect orientation, and a model view controller
• Worked in an agile Scrum environment using continuous integration processes
• Implemented Hibernate as a persistence provider in multiple applications
• Used Ant scripting to control project builds and Ivy for dependency management
• Built several Maven projects in addition to converting projects from Ant/Ivy to Maven
• Wrote web services and service contracts in the WSDL format, as well as XSD schema
• Testing done in Java using JUnit, web service testing in SoapUI, and functional testing with Selenium
• Developed Android applications using web services and open source APIs