Professional Experience

Jennifer “Jenn” Strater is an experienced engineering leader who is dedicated to community work and contributes to new and innovative technologies such as Spring REST Docs, Codenarc, Apache Groovy, and Gradle. Jenn made her career as a conference speaker at large events such as the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, SpringOne Platform, Devoxx Belgium, and many others.

Her strong ties with the developer community including running the Groovy Community Slack Team, leadership experience within several organizations including as a founder of GR8Ladies (now GR8DI) and committee member for GR8Conf EU and US, and mentoring younger developers have prepared her for new leadership challenges.

After spending several months in the trenches of the Biden campaign, it’s time to get back to leading teams.


Experience

JOE BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT, Remote (June 2020 - November 2020)

  • enabled the 50k+ volunteers nationwide and 20k+ in battleground states to send millions of text messages per day.

  • constrained by integration tools with 1rps rate limit, still managed to handle 7rps spikes with ease

  • transformed 5+ GB CSV files from vendors into s3 and spectrum tables

  • created slack bots to integrate with texting program security

  • performed website QA especially a11y and i18n

  • improved build performance and security with CodeKit, npm, and Gradle


GRADLE, Remote from Berlin, Germany (thru December 2019) then Minneapolis, MN (from January 2020)

Developer Advocate (October 2018 - Present)

  • acted as an intermediary between Gradle users (developers) and Gradle’s engineering teams. This included basic support, providing references to the relevant documentation, and escalating to other team members as needed.

  • maintained the infrastructure for documentation projects using Asciidoc, Jekyll, Gradle, GitHub Pages, TeamCity, IntelliJ Idea, and more

  • wrote Java and Groovy-based POCs for Gradle and Gradle Enterprise features using both the Groovy and Kotlin Gradle DSLs

  • created blog posts, videos, conference talks, workshop materials, social media posts, etc promoting Gradle as a thought leader in Developer Productivity

Developer Advocacy team lead (May 2019 to May 2020)

  • set long term strategy with upper-level management

  • led collaborative projects with engineering, marketing, and sales

  • managed the event and content strategy for advocacy topics

  • reviewed content and code for Developer Advocacy and other teams


ZENJOB GMBH, Berlin, Germany

Senior Engineer (June 2017 - September 2018)

  • handled various leadership tasks related to:

    • hiring and recruiting

    • writing documentation

    • improving development processes

    • supporting and encouraging community engagement

    • formalizing a policy on education, training, and conferences

    • mentoring working students

    • answering questions about Groovy, Grails, and Gradle for the Backend Team

  • led the project and completed a majority of the work for a migration of the monolith from Grails 3.0.17 to 3.3.6 which included migrating Hibernate from 4 to 5 and Gradle from 2.12 to 4.8.

  • developed multiple small features to support the business needs of two mobile apps and a React frontend

  • maintained a Grails-based internal admin dashboard along with the rest of the Backend team

  • integrated static analysis and code coverage tooling into the build pipeline

  • assisted with firefighting backend outages and performance issues

  • architected and implemented major projects relating to security and API design (according to business needs)

  • participated in Hackathons with projects related to Android libraries, documentation tooling, and upgrading frameworks/technical debt.

  • Tools Used: Groovy, Grails, Postgres, Codenarc, Spock, Gradle, TravisCI, AWS (EB, EC2, S3, OpsWorks, etc), Jacoco, Clover, GEB, TestContainers, Hibernate


TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF DENMARK, Lyngby, Denmark

Fulbright Scholar (August 2016 - May 2017)

Took classes, studied the Groovy Programming Language, and mentored students in Groovy related technologies

  • worked on a group project to perform static analysis on the formal language MicroC using Groovy, Antlr4 and Gradle

  • Participated in a group project and paper to research fault tolerance of web applications in the cloud including the building of a development pipeline using AWS and several Netflix OSS projects including Spinnaker and Chaos Monkey.

  • Completed Lab exercises to create SOAP-based web services using OpenESB, Netbeans, Java, BPEL, and Junit.

  • Learned about proper security protocols and cryptography

  • Tools Used: Gradle, Groovy, Grails, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Jenkins, Travis CI, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Twitter Bootstrap, Linux Ubuntu, Tomcat, IntelliJ IDEA, Git Bash


GR8LADIES, Remote

Co-Founder, Managing Director, & Website Manager (October 2013 - December 2017)

Designed, developed, and maintains grails application for the Gr8Ladies organization

  • Designed the website from a basic Twitter bootstrap template

  • Incorporated social media and PayPal donation widgets

  • Added a RESTful API to show gender ratios at various companies submitted via http://jlstrater.github.io/gr8ladies-d3

  • Organizes meetups, Gr8Workshops, and coordinates with sponsors

  • Tools Used: Groovy, Grails, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Travis CI, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Twitter Bootstrap, Linux Ubuntu, Tomcat, IntelliJ IDEA, Git Bash, Windows 8.1


OBJECT PARTNERS, INC, Minneapolis, MN

Senior Consultant (March 2015 - August 2016)

PEOPLENET, Minnetonka, MN

Back-End Engineer, Data Relationships Team (January 2016 - Present)

Project to relate datasets from various enterprise systems

  • Tools Used: Spring Boot, Groovy, Gradle, SPARQL, Apache Jena, RDF, Spring REST Docs, Asciidoctor

Back-End Engineer, API Gateway & Documentation Project (September 2015 - January 2016)

Central gateway for customer-facing services and documentation hub.

  • Tools Used: Spring Boot, Groovy, Gradle, Swagger, Asciidoctor, Spring REST Docs

Engineer, Developer Portal (July 2015 - August 2015)

Landing page and portal to aggregate developer documentation and code examples.

  • Tools Used: KeystoneJS, NodeJS, MongoDB, Express, Bootstrap, Gulp, Grunt, Docker, MongoLab

Front-End Engineer, OEM Portal (April 2015 - July 2015)

Developed features for an administrative portal to visualize and administer semi-truck systems.

  • Tools Used: AngularJS, Karma, Grunt, Gulp, Bootstrap, Angular Material Design

OBJECT PARTNERS TRAINING DEPARTMENT, Minneapolis, MN

Content Developer (March 2015 - April 2015)

Updated Grails training material to Grails 3.0

  • Tools Used: Reveal.js, Jade, Javascript, Grails, Groovy, GVM, H2


ALTEGRA HEALTH Healthcare Communications Division (formerly WarmHealth), Minneapolis, MN

Software Engineer (June 2013 - February 2015)

Agile development and maintenance of multiple Grails applications for a healthcare

communications platform

  • Developed RESTful APIs to integrate with external clients and other divisions

  • Updated Documentation related to APIs and system tools

  • Supported production systems on a rotating schedule with 3 other developers

  • Participated in stand-ups and iteration planning meetings

  • Participated in design discussions and architectural decisions

  • Evaluated new tools in quarterly hackathons including D3.js and Docker

  • Completed many Agile User Stories for data integration, batch jobs, member site updates, client portal updates, API integration, billing/reports, and production support

  • Tools: Groovy/Grails, MySQL, Redis, Jesque, Git, Junit, Spock, AngularJS, Backbone.js, VirtualBox, AWS (EC2 and S3), Puppet, Jenkins CI, Nginx, Redshift


ROBERT HALF TECHNOLOGY freelancer at

GROUPDCA, A PDI INC COMPANY

JUNIOR WEB DEVELOPER (Jan 2012-May 2013)

Development of projects, platforms, and admin tools for a pharmaceutical digital marketing firm. Also assigned to an R&D project to create a social network to connect doctors with pharmaceutical sales reps through iPad apps and a website.

R&D Team

  • Developed APIs in Symfony2 and PHP

  • Created administrative tools in Symfony2

  • Collaborated on PhoneGap/Cordova iPad Application and Web Site for Doctors

  • Assisted in management of systems and DB for iPad Application for Sales Reps

  • Managed systems and used tools including: PHP, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, LAMP, WAMP, MAMP, Kiln, Mercurial, Xcode, MySQL, MongoLab, Expression Engine, Ubuntu, Rackspace

Core Development Team

  • Assembled demos for sales presentations

  • Managed and created custom html5 content for Veeva iRep, a salesforce tool

  • Generated custom database reports and marketing metrics

  • Programmed flash interactions for client projects

  • Assisted in rebuilding hosting platform in Symfony2

  • Developed micro sites and landing pages to host flash projects

  • Tools included: PHP, Symfony2, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PL/SQL, MySQL, ActionScript, Kiln, Mercurial, NetBeans