“We hired Brandon to do some front-end work, but to say he’s a “front-end developer” is to sell him short - way short. He took our application from an old-school, render everything on the server app to a modern single page app. He initiated that - he didn’t wait for someone to say we should move to a single page web app. He’s great a keeping several projects in mind simultaneously. Among the developers on our team, Brandon always had the best best-picture view of the application and the various projects going on concurrently. He always showed a can-do attitude, taking on a mobile app with Phone Gap and a Chrome extension. He’s a great asset, especially for a small team where people need to wear multiple hats.”
About
As the Director of Engineering at EveryoneSocial, I lead a team of talented frontend and…
Experience
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Licenses & Certifications
Recommendations received
7 people have recommended Brandon
Join now to viewOther similar profiles
Explore more posts
-
Eric Ingamells
Can someone explain to me how to get "more experience"? I have 16 years of full stack software engineering experience, mostly in C# .Net 4.2 through 8, including .Net Core 2.x & 3.x, along with WCF, WPF, Winforms, Razor/Blazor, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with Entity Framework, Dapper, Linq, SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, NoSql, and other databases. And a few of those years include a combination of Java, PHP, and C/C++. I've also used MarkDown, PowerShell, MVC framework, Swashbuckle/Swagger, Newtonsoft, JSON .Net, TopShelf, and a variety of testing frameworks. But apparently that's not enough. In the past 3 years alone, I've learned ReactJS, TypeScript, Xamarin, XAML, Maui, NodeJS, Terraform, AWS, and Azure, and I'm currently learning Angular, but that doesn't cover the 3-5 years of experience jobs want. I've learned some of these skills through jobs, but also some on my own. Except that as often as companies want us to learn these skills outside of work, they only count professional experience when it comes to hiring. My last interview said I needed more experience, as if the previously mentioned 16 years wasn't enough, and neither was the 15 years of computer repair and networking before that, which their interview questions also covered. So if no one is willing to hire because people don't already have experience, how are we supposed to get the experience? And don't say "open source projects", because they don't count as professional experience. Or do I have to take a 50% pay cut to take an "entry level" job that still requires 3-5 years of experience that I somehow still don't have? People are quick to say that "no one wants to work anymore" when they can't get hired, but they never seem to think "businesses aren't willing to teach anymore" when they refuse to hire people. Why? Is it that we are so conditioned to think that it's always the individuals fault for not living up to expectations, instead of the businesses fault for setting unrealistic and ever changing expectations? So, I ask again, how can I get the required experience when employers refuse to hire unless I already have experience?
-
Danny Schwab
I'm going to post a few challenges I have had as a software QA. I should be relaxing today but those that know me, know my brain is always in thirty places at once. To developers: Trust your QA. Y'all don't know how many times I've heard, "Well, it works on my local". I don't care. In the test environment, it breaks. I do my due diligence to investigate why, present evidence in logs and from the database, present recordings, and meticulously document steps of reproduction and results. And even after, I still get, "It works on my local". Get off the dang local. NO ONE knows this software, app, platform, etc. better than the QA because we live it more than anyone else does. To business analysts: I know you all are overwhelmed. But please stop copying and pasting Acceptance Criteria for similar features. It makes a mess for developers and QA because the AC doesn't match or conflicts with not only the developed feature but integration as well. Which brings me to my next point... What QA is: Everyone thinks of us as just testers. I am sick of that. I spend half my time working with the product owner, BAs, and Devs, just making sure the AC reflects the solution needing to be resolved. I can't tell you how many times I have had to address with the BAs conflicts in a story over AC, nonsensical AC, WTF verbiage, etc. So then the developers get confused and we are in long meetings addressing what is messed up. We are here to help you ask the questions you didn't think to ask. We don't just test..... we look at future issues too. We like process improvements. Automation: Stop asking me to automate a one-off feature test that hasn't even gone through UAT yet. It's time wasted. Too many companies do this. Might as well give me the day off for the time it takes to do that because the automation is useless after UAT. Learn the purpose of automation. Product Owner: When I tell you before a demo not to demo certain things because there are still issues, don't shred me after the demo because you decided to demo them anyway and they break. I TOLD YOU not to do that, and why. Data: QA worst nightmare. My last position I would get two test records to test against 20 AC when I first started. I said "Helz no". I built up a catalog of test records I could use, positive and negative, as I progressed because I want multiple records against every AC. Which I often shared with the developers for their unit tests who loved it. QA needs data, all. You give me two records, don't yell at me that coverage isn't thorough. Probably sounded more a rant. But I'm opinionated. Where many QA are not. And these are common issues. Want to improve QA, improve the above.
34 Comments -
Allie Howe
Do you want your developers to actually use the security tooling you buy for them? Here’s an action plan 👇 1. First, make sure you have insight into your engineering team. This is easy if you have a small company and your security lead is also a developer. If not consider asking folks to be security guardians and serve as a bridge between the security team and engineering. 2. Next, get feedback. Have your security lead or guardian help collect feedback on what’s working well or not working well. Are security tests on PRs taking too long or failing? Do engineers get actionable results back from security scans and are test results easily understood? 3. Pursue a solution. See if you can solve the issue yourself or if not ask to jump on a call with your vendor. Hopefully you’ve partnered with a great vendor that takes their customer support seriously. Convey that the issue is preventing your company from seeing value from that tool. 4. Make this feedback loop continuous. If your security team is well integrated into your engineering team they’ll hear of developer pain early and be able to fix it early. This will ensure security remains integrated into their workflows and the SDLC. For tips on how to build a Security Guardians program checkout this resource from Ana Malhotra in the comments below. What other strategies would you add?
4 Comments -
Marc Smith
Ok, everyone has an unpopular take. Here is mine. Your testing is flawed. All of it. Automation? Flawed. Manual? Flawed. BDD? Flawed. Code coverage? Flawed. Entrance or Exit? Flawed. Performance? Flawed. Environment? Flawed It's all flawed. Why? Because the moment you put something into Production, that is a series of variables you CANNOT duplicate in test scenarios. Because there are dozens of other systems out there that you have to play nice with, and you CANNOT duplicate these in test environments, Because the customer has expectations that the moment you flip the switch, things will work out of the box and everything will sync up nice and everyone will be happy. Until Mary can't get to the Company Payroll systems because no one mentioned that tidbit in Discovery calls. You CANNOT duplicate Mary. And, there is a flaw in this post. Did you find it?
5 Comments -
Ben Nadel
As I'm getting back into #Angular, I'm remembering how much my brain has trouble working with RxJS Streams. But, it just occurred to me, I don't actually have to use their HttpClient module—I can use my own fetch client. All I want is Promises and AbortControllers. This is not a slight against RxJS—I know that many people are intensely in love with it. But my brain just can't deal. Resolves and rejections for HTTP requests, that's what my brain can understand. RxJS feels like more abstraction than I can handle. Maybe it has something to do with my Aphantasia.
6 Comments -
J. Michael Hammond
After a third-of-a-century career as a software tester, I'm done. I'm hanging 'em up. I'm retiring. I'm 58 years old and therefore supposed to call this an "early" retirement. I'm not going to let the nominal age at which I can start drawing Social Security benefits define early-vs.-late, though, so I am not going to use that term. I have no grand retirement plans. My horizon is a couple-three months out - I have a few hobbies, and I'm going to install Jira at home and build a backlog of maintenance and improvement projects* with the intent of not being in a particular hurry to start executing. (*both "home" and "personal", if you follow me) You know what, though - this sounds like the first chapter of some kind of adventure novel. "How did I end up getting involved in <something you'd never think I'd do>," something along those lines. So I'll write it out loud here - I'm way past being the protagonist in a thriller story, but if you need someone to be, like, the guy on the other end of the phone who provides you the information or communication assistance so that *you* can undertake the dangerous and exciting adventure, hey, call me up. A career in software testing leaves me with no special adventuring skills or important influential connections, or anything like that, but at least I'll have some spare time, the need for which, in my opinion, isn't emphasized enough in the description of supporting characters in novels and movies.
15 Comments -
Dominic Fox
Watched a portion of the old Brian Will video on why OOP is bad (https://lnkd.in/epvfRpPR), and bombed out fairly hard when he came out with the puzzling assertion that messages between objects properly speaking shouldn't include object references. Well, there goes your visitor pattern; there goes the UI staple of registering objects with some event bus for callbacks when particular events happen. Is there some source in the literature (Alan Kay, I guess) for this odd restriction? It seems like a basic misapprehension: sure, messages should transfer representations of internal state and not haphazardly leak references to the state itself (otherwise external parties can mutate it without going through the owning object's protocol), but it's also a pretty basic affordance of message-passing systems that the addresses of things that can receive messages are first-class things that can be passed around (compare URIs in REST, or channels in pi calculus). The other odd assertion was that permitting many objects in an arbitrary graph to hold a reference to an object and access its methods was as bad as having global shared state. It fairly obviously isn't: the ability to exercise the protocol for reading or updating a particular bit of state can get passed around to wherever it needs to be, but isn't immediately available to everything, and pretty much the whole point is that you're passing a pointer to the protocol, not the rights to inspect and modify the data structures it guards. It seems that Will wants to argue for a hierarchical flow of messages down a DAG-shaped stack of routines and subroutines with a single controlling root procedure, rather than a potentially cyclic call graph with objects fielding requests from all angles. In practice that's what your average Spring Boot service actually does of course: controller to service to persistence or external client layer, and back up again. But (and this is an argument for a future post) that's because the average Spring Boot service is fundamentally procedural code, with a bit of indirection between modules. Other topologies are possible, and appropriate for particular use cases. The most generous reading I can give of Will's argument is that OOP offers more flexibility than perhaps a majority of actually existing programs really need, and we'd be happier and less burdened by object bureaucracy if we wrote those programs in a more constrained idiom. I actually think that's kind of true, but haven't got to the bottom of what it means in practice just yet.
-
Luke Mueller
So that's theVercel/Next.js flavor of React.... Looks like you have to contend with new debugging patterns that aren't covered in this course - you're no longer looking at json payloads in the request/response, so what is the approach (or am i wrong)? Is the network tab in dev tools just worthless now with these frameworks just shuttling js payloads back and forth in their proprietary(?) formats? I was thinking this would be a selling point over blazor/webassembly, but apparently not. I feel like a dinosaur hanging onto the simplicity of JSON REST APIs. Suggested reading?
-
James Hutchison
Me as a mod for my subreddit, using the company account: "What's this 'crowd control button that has a traffic cone next to it do?'" Presses it on a post I just made Server error message pops up Refresh the page Subreddit is banned I realize my account got shadow banned. I search and find that crowd control is for managing spam accounts. I just marked my own account as a spam account. Reddit lets mods mark you as a spam account which affects your whole site experience. All support is done via subreddits. If it contains the word "banned" you can't post because they don't want you to complain about a powertrip mod banning you from a subreddit. If you find a way to post it's immediately removed without explanation. I get an automated message telling me the email was never verified. I realize that the Google workspace group needed "create posts" enabled for everyone, so the "confirm your email" emails weren't going through. I verify the email still banned, with error message I send a message to modsupport, with still no reply after several days. I reply to the bot with no follow up. I proceed to get emails about how to improve my still banned subreddit Seriously reconsidering buying reddit ads after this. Parts of their site, such as messages, a core, heavily used feature, that's crucial to several workflows, looks like it's from 1998. Wtf do reddit engineers and product do?
-
Rilwanu Isyaku
Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine are currently at odds over the direction of WordPress. At the 2024 WordCamp US conference, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, made a bold statement, calling WP Engine a "cancer to WordPress." He criticized the hosting company's business practices, suggesting that they profited off the WordPress ecosystem without giving back to its development. This sentiment sparked significant debate within the community, as Mullenweg emphasized the disparity between what Automattic and other companies invest in WordPress. But it didn’t end there. WP Engine, a leading WordPress hosting platform, responded swiftly. They filed legal action against Automattic, accusing Mullenweg of defamation and making false claims. According to WP Engine, the issue wasn’t just about the comments at WordCamp; they also alleged that Mullenweg had demanded a substantial payment from WP Engine before the event, which they refused. This legal battle has caused ripples in the WordPress community, raising questions about how companies should contribute to open-source projects and what role commercial entities play in the broader ecosystem. It’s a tense situation, with two major players locked in a dispute, and the future impact on WordPress is yet to unfold. Follow Rilwanu Isyaku to stay in the loop. #matt #wordpress #wpengine #automattic #trends
-
Heemeng (Chris) Foo
Great article by Ray Carnes. In my 20+ years in the software industry I've seen companies learn and relearn the basics again and again because each generation of leaders think things are "different this time" because of such and such technology. The frameworks, platforms, underlying technology changes but the principles and foundations are still the same. #softwareengineering
3 Comments -
Nick Foscarini
I tried TDD for years—and this is what no one tells you: 1) Full coverage isn’t a shield—it just looks nice on paper. 2) Bugs love slipping past the most confident tests. 3) Maintenance is harder when your tests don’t tell the story. 4) TDD only works if you stick to it—and most don’t. 5) The best developers aren’t the ones with 100% coverage—they know where it matters. 6) Code evolves faster than tests can keep up. 7) Unit tests don’t find all bugs—just the ones you thought of. 8) Writing tests can save others more time than it saves you. 9) Unit tests document your assumptions more than your logic. 10) Sometimes deleting old tests is the smartest move you’ll make.
173 Comments -
Elton Cheung
Waking up to a email like this👇 everyday? If you’ve spent hours fixing broken tests, you know how much time is lost. Traditional QA setups mean that minors product changes could fail a test, and left you manually identifying and patching the problem. And then it happens again. And again. 😤 With the power of AI, what if broken tests could heal themselves? Imagine a world where: AI identifies and ‘self-heals’ tests by adapting to small, expected changes 🔧 Test scripts are dynamically updated, reducing the need for manual intervention 💼 Failures are flagged only when they signal real issues, not minor UI or data changes ⚙️ This is what we’re building at TessanaAI. With AI-driven self-healing, your QA process becomes smoother and more resilient, saving you from repetitive fixes. 👉 Have you ever struggled with recurring broken tests? Let’s talk in the comments!" Hashtags: #QATesting #Automation #AI #SelfHealingTests #QualityAssurance #SoftwareDevelopment #AITools Akshay Navada
2 Comments -
Logan Abbott
KDE Developer: Why Plasma 6.2 Includes a Once-a-Year Popup for Donations: "If you're plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations..." writes KDE developer Nate Graham on his personal blog. But "We know that the fraction of people who subscribe to these channels is small, so there's a huge number of people who may not even know they can donate to KDE, let alone that donations are critically important to its continued existence..." From 6.2 onwards, Plasma itself will show a system notification asking for a donation once per year, in December. The idea here is to get the message that KDE really does need your financial help in front of more eyeballs — especially eyeballs not currently looking at KDE's public-facing promotion efforts... [W]e tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It's small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it'll go away until next year. It's implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like. You can also disable just the popup on System Settings' Notifications page, accessible from the configure button in the notification's header. Ultimately the decision to do this came down to the following factors: — We looked at FOSS peers like Thunderbird and Wikipedia which have similar things (and in Wikipedia's case, the message is vastly more intrusive and naggy). In both cases, it didn't drive everyone away and instead instead resulted in a massive increase in donations that the projects have been able to use to employ lots of people. - KDE really needs something like this to help our finances grow sustainably in line with our userbase and adoption by vendors and distributors. The blog post also answers the question: what are you going to do with all that money? This is a question the KDE e.V. board of directors as a whole would need to answer, and any decision on it will be made collectively. But as one of the five members on that board, I can tell you my personal answer and the one that as your representative, I'd advocate for. It's basically the platform I ran on two years ago: extend an offer of full-time employment to our current people, and hire even more! I want us to end up with paid QA people and distro developers, and even more software engineers. I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it. I want us to to extend our promotional activities and outreach to other major distros and vendors and pitch our software to them directly. I want to see Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ship Plasma by default. I want us to use this money to take over the world — with freedom, empowerment, and kindness. These have been dreams for a long time, and throughout KDE we've been slowly moving towards them ov
-
Taylor Page
Update for ShopDev Alliance David Lindahl and I sent an update Tuesday for folks who were in first round of signups talking pricing and onboarding. Folks who expressed interest in Founding Member tier will get an update Monday AM. Everyone who has expressed interest should have at least got the application email. We have an application process to make sure we’re staying true to the vision of ShopDev Alliance. This is not a take everyone’s money and let you in sort of thing. This is a moderated community with a code of conduct, values, and standards to promote a curated space for experienced devs. If you hadn’t signed up by Tuesday we won’t be sending another update email while working through applications. Next update you get will be onboarding (payment + community signup). Almost 200 devs have submitted interest in ShopDev Alliance 🚀 Around 70 have submitted their application 🎉 David and I are blown away by the response! We had no idea this would resonate so much and expected at best a third of the numbers we’re working through. Thank you all so much for supporting, sharing, and buying into the cause 🙏 We won’t let you down. See you in there 🫡
5 Comments -
Jason Gorman
I was watching a video that talked about what software developers focus on at different stages of their careers, and one notable take was that "Distinguished Engineers" are focused on the *industry*, and not just their company. This is typically because they've engaged with communities outside of where they're working for many years. They say travel "broadens the mind", and learning from and sharing with developers in a wide range of situations tends to give people a much broader sense of software development. Not everything is Big Tech or Fintech or Medtech or Gametech. Not every product is a smartphone app or a website. Not every product has millions or billions of users. (Proportionally, very few do, in fact; so it's interesting how much we obsess over scale.) Not every code base is 100 million lines. Not every code base is 100,000 lines. Not every system has contemporary hardware to run on. Not every platform can accept updates easily (many embedded systems are ship-once). Not every bug or outage is merely an inconvenience (just ask an airline pilot!) Not every product is about profit. And so on, and so on. Learning about what other people, in other roles, in other organisations, in other industries, in other countries, do will tend to make you a much more well-rounded software professional. It will expand your horizons, as well as create opportunities for the wider developer community to have their horizons expanded from your experiences. In particular, there seems to be fairly wide agreement that a "Distinguished Engineer" has made a notable and lasting contribution to the field and the profession of software development. This seems to be encouraged in organisations who pay it forward; who are happy for their most experienced engineers to "share the love" outside of the walls of their business. When a dev, say, creates a testing framework or writes a book or organises a meet-up on their employer's dime, the employer recognises the long-term value of paying it forward. When employers insist developers engage outside of the business entirely in their own time, and entirely at their own expense, those people will usually end up distinguising some other company. And, of course, if that dev-all-the-way-to-the-top career track isn't on offer, then ditto :-)
Explore collaborative articles
We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.
Explore MoreOthers named Brandon H. in United States
-
Brandon H.
Senior Recruitment Consultant - Investment Banking & Private Equity
-
Brandon H.
President of Integration @ Edgeworth Security
-
Brandon H
Co-Founder of the Nova Execution Services a Division of Tradition Securities and Derivatives Inc.
-
Brandon H
Funding Manager at Infusion Capital
-
Brandon H
Finance, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Inc.
232 others named Brandon H. in United States are on LinkedIn
See others named Brandon H.