Gerardo Castillo

My primary responsibilities as a technical leader and project manager are managing software development teams in Ruby on Rails, Java, and .Net to generate business value for our clients, ensuring the technology is the right fit for the circumstances. I often help define the systems' architecture and helping to implement features when required.

Other activities include, coaching and training, participating in our community of practices, participating in hiring processes and interviewing Software developers and managers, and managing client relationships and presentations.

Projects:

Loan Origination (July 2017 – Present)

As a technical leader, I participate in the Scrum of Scrums, Architectural meetings, code reviews, managing the scrum team efforts, helping tailor and implement business requests, and handling priorities.
My role as a Project Manager is to monitor work and manage resources in different teams, manage client requests and contribute to promoting a culture of continuous improvement.
We are adding new features, performing maintenance, and working on more tactical goals as framework upgrades to the Loan Origination Apps.

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Java, Spring Boot, Python, Robot Framework, Docker / Kubernetes, React, AWS, Azure services.

Scientific and Medical Articles (March 2013 – July 2017)

This company manages the publication of articles and magazines. The system keeps track of every data generated during this process by implementing several workflows within the application and interacting with every step from creation through publishing.
As a technical leader, I concentrated on defining the system's architecture, testing certain aspects of infrastructure, and developing tasks.
As a Project Manager, I kept track of the project's progress using an Agile Scrum hybrid methodology and managed the assigned resources.

Technologies: .Net, MVC, Webforms, WF, AWS EC2, SMS and SES.

Digital Photo Frame (October 2012 - February 2013)

The company developed an on-screen digital picture frame software oriented to older people.

Main tasks executed in the project:

My role in this project as a Senior Developer was related to adding new features and making performance improvements. I migrated the application from rails 3.0.3 to 3.2.11. I also changed the database and the ruby code to improve the performance and remove code smells. In addition, I helped design the communication between the server and the client to handle logins per device.

As a Project Lead, I oversaw the overall monitoring of the effort during the last few months, managing the quality, keeping track of the progress, and handling client requests.

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Heroku, JQuery, JQuery-UI, AWS RDS.

Education Company (September 2011 - September 2012)

The company is a joint Innovation Lab / Office of Information Technology project to help produce accessible content packages.

As a developer in this project, I created two web services to provide Text to Speech functionality to incorporate audio files as accessibility resources in the APIP packages.

Besides the web services, I exposed the TTS functionality and played the audio in the Spoken Modifier application using AJAX and HTML 5.

As a technical lead, I monitored developers to ensure they followed the agile development process and standards defined for the project.

Technologies: .Net, C#, MVC4, Web API, Jquery, JQuery-UI.

Generator of Web applications (October 2009 - August 2011)

This company focused on creating an Automatic Generator of Web applications using Ruby and Ruby on Rails. This system has three main components: an Application Designer, an Application Generator, and the Generated Applications.

My role in this project as a developer included design activities and reviewing that the team was applying best practices related to programming and ruby on rails.

I designed several core components of the application that supports the main workflow of the process and put together a Linux script to automatically configure the server with the required environment, programs, and libraries for the project.

Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails 2 and 3, JQuery, JQuery-UI.

Insurance (March 2008 - September 2009)

This company has a portal for insurance data exchange for agents and agencies.

My role in this project as a developer included maintaining the entire application according to enhancements and issues reported by the company.

The development includes the maintenance and creation of JSP pages, XSLT templates, and Java classes that hold the application logic.

Technologies: Java, JSP, Tomcat, Struts, Cocoon, and Microsoft SQLServer.

I worked under contract for the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE), the primary provider of electricity and telecommunication services in Costa Rica.

During this maintenance contract, I added functionality to keep stable several intranet systems they use daily to keep track of the public telephones maintenance, telephony cards inventory and billing information, and internet kiosks.

As a developer, I made fixes and added functionality to several systems. For these tasks, I also made the analysis and requirements documentation.

Technologies: PowerBuilder, Sybase, Solaris, SQL Server, UML Visual Basic, Dialogic libraries for VB (IVR handling), Sybase, .NET Framework, Java

As a software developer, I participated in the maintenance of the corporate site www.grupoice.com and the intranet web applications of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE), the primary provider of electricity and telecommunication services in Costa Rica.

Technologies: IBM Websphere, Sybase Enterprise Portal.

As a software developer, I worked on implementing new features and maintaining several systems.

Projects:

TQS

Design and development of Total Quality System to control the production of Chiquita Brands Company.

Technologies: Visual Basic, Microsoft SQLServer, Crystal Reports.

Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE)

Development of an Application Integrator program that allows starting and updating several applications from a single interface. Technologies and tools involved: Visual Basic, Windows API, Sybase.

Design and development of a web application that provides consolidated reports of the public telephony billing process of Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad.

Technologies: Microsoft SQLServer, OLAP, Sybase, Asp, Microsoft Office Web Components.

As a Developer, I performed several installations of Remote Access Servers using Windows NT.

I also worked in system documentation and as a tutor for Microsoft Office, e-mail, and the Internet.

Development of a calendar application for meetings.

Technologies : Visual Basic.