Rod Knowlton

Rod Knowlton

I make computers do things.

I’m that friend that can produce a delicious meal from whatever you have in the pantry, except the pantry is a computer and the delicious meal is a solved problem.

I’m an autodidact, a polyglot programmer, and lover of fancy words.

Likes: pair programming, TDD, open source, Spacemacs, Extreme Programming, long walks on the beach with Github.

Dislikes: Unnecessary meetings, silos.

I believe in the 40 hour work week, and that if you stop learning you stop living.

Experience

Senior Backend AI Engineer - Atlas UP (Jan 2022 to Aug 2025)

  • Senior member of development team working on a SaaS product yet to be released formally.
  • Developed chains and agents making use of Langchain/Langgraph for a variety of purposes, from simple summarizers to routing based agents with full libraries of procedural tools. Leveraged my experience in Python and Django to implement syncing solutions with third-party apis.

Senior Developer - Summit ESP (March 2018 to Jan 2022)

  • Member of team implementing a caching and communications middleware api for SAP integration of an in-house inventory, sales, and workflow application with parent company. The application and the integration solution are both in Python and Django. The application front-end, which I worked on briefly, uses AngularJS.

Senior Mobile App Developer - JoCo (September 2017 to January 2018)

Contract staffing, working on an internal Telerik AppBuilder application for an oil and gas pipeline company.

  • In three months, I was able to knock out most of a six month backlog of bugs and feature requests.

  • While adding features and improving maintainability, I reduced the codebase’s LOC by approximately five thousand lines.

  • I assisted in migration away from Telerik Platform, which was shutting down, to a locally managed build and deploy solution.

Self-Paid Sabbatical (March 2017 to September 2017)

A period of rest and relaxation after accepting early retirement from HCSC. Not strictly the sort of thing to list on a resumé as experience, but I recommend that everyone take one if given the chance.

Senior Mobile Application Developer - HCSC (June 1998 to February 2017)

In just shy of twenty years with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma (later merged with HCSC), I worked in IT roles ranging from operator to systems administrator to applications developer. I consider all of those roles as having expanded my tool set.

  • I was the sole developer on the first three versions of the flagship Android and iOS apps for BCBS of Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Montana, all of which were Cordova/Phonegap applications.

  • I was a member of the joint HCSC/Pivotal Labs XP team developing the fourth generation of those apps, complete re-writes in native Java and Swift, which have been released to the app stores (iOS in Nov 2016, and Android in Feb 2017).

Technical Experience

Programming Languages
Python My current favorite language due to its incredibly vast ecosystem. Seven plus years experience, mostly in Django environments.

JavaScript: Probably the language in which I’ve written the most code, although unfortunately in environments that prevented the use of ES6. Still, I’ve written web page interactions, Cordova applications (some ported from native Objective C and Java apps), and a custom command line build system that helped manage the build and deployment to give separate Blue Cross Blue Shield state plans their own, properly branded and configured, versions of a basic iOS and Android app that served as the base of them all.

Swift: My last year with HCSC was spent on a joint HCSC/Pivotal team porting the flagship Cordova app (see above) back to native. I was then primary engineer on the migration of the app from Swift 2.3 to Swift 3. I love this language and haven’t gotten to spend nearly as much time with it as I would like to.

Java: I’ve kept familiar with it since back when Java In A Nutshell fit in one, fairly thin, book. I’ve done Android work in Java, as well as backend work involving both web application and web services (both SOAP and REST).

So Many Others I’m a generalist, and have basic knowledge of more languages than I could list here, although I did make a list of the ones I’d been paid for once upon a time. Basically, if it’s not Prolog or a deliberately obtuse language like Brainf*ck, I can get up to speed quickly. I’m especially interested in the modern JVM languages like Kotlin, Clojure, and Scala.

Dev in the House of Ops

In my previous life as a system admin, I had a chance to work on some solo projects that provided business value.

  • I wrote a secure alternative to more and pg (both of which allow shell escapes) in awk. This script was used throughout my subsidiary’s custom Universe/SB+ applications to close a security gap created by the insecure permissions scheme required by Universe at the time.

  • I created a change management system for my subsidiary using an ad-hoc object storage and retrieval system I wrote in ksh93. The system isolated the developers from production, and allowed code review and promotion to production only by authorized users.

  • Wrote a Perl program to convert monthly reports to PDFs, which could then be stored on CD-ROM, eliminating over $5K monthly spend on micro-fiche conversion, speeding turnaround, and improving searchability.

Open Source
I love open source software, and have contributed to, among others, Firefox iOS, Browserify, and Coffeescript, as well corrections to documentation whenever I spot a typo or incorrect statement on Github, since they make it so easy to fork and submit a pull request within the web interface.

Education

Tulsa Community College

Tulsa University

Other Stuff

  • I am a text editor egalitarian who loves both Vim and Emacs, and currently use Spacemacs, which is both.
  • One time world record holder on the arcade games Zaxxon and Journey.
  • Founding donor of Techlahoma
  • I’m @codelahoma just about everywhere.

rod@codelahoma.com • (918) 810 6427 • 3411 East 57th Street, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74135