Ben Olson

Chief Executive Officer at Essium, LLC

Experienced Software Engineer with over 15 years of experience building data-driven applications with current web technologies. Made significant contributions to the development of several production systems through the entire product life-cycle. Led and mentored development teams and created innovative solutions to meet customer needs. Self-motivated individual with a passion for learning new technologies. Front-end: • Designed and developed browser-based applications built utilizing several Javascript libraries including YUI, jQuery UI, Flot (graphing), and BackboneJS (MVC). • In depth knowledge of HTML5 concepts including Canvas, CSS3 Translations, and Local Storage. • Experience interfacing to REST API end-points using JSON, cross-domain requests, and OAuth protected resources. Server-side: • Constructed REST API end-points in both PHP and Ruby (Rack/Sinatra) that persisted data directly through the database driver or ORM libraries like DataMapper and MongoMapper. • Experience using various APIs for email, image/PDF manipulation (ImageMagick), and other web-services end-points (SOAP/REST). • Knowledge installing and building server stacks in Linux for PHP/Ruby based environments (Apache, MySQL, etc) in VirtualBox, Rackspace Cloud, and Amazon EC2. Database: • Significant experience writing complex SQL queries and building database objects like views, triggers, and stored procedures. • Examined explain plans for complex queries to identify issues and recommend strategies to improve performance. • Comfortable creating normalized relational data models and generating required DDL to build objects in a target database.