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.

Previous Experience

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

Developer Advocate (October 2018 - Present)

  • Acting Developer Advocacy team lead (May 2019 to present)
    • meets with upper-level management to discuss long term strategy
    • plans and delegates work to other teams as needed
    • leads cross-team projects with the engineering, marketing, and sales teams
    • writes team status reports and updates metrics
    • reviews content for Developer Advocacy and other teams
  • leads and implements several initiatives for educating users about new features in Gradle build tool and Gradle Enterprise
  • creates content (blog posts, videos, conference talks, workshop materials, etc) promoting Gradle as a thought leader in Developer Productivity
  • manages social media accounts and related content
  • coordinates conference talks and the 2019/2020 event strategy for advocacy topics

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

APAC CUSTOMER SERVICES, INC

CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE (July 2010-December 2011)

  • Tier 1 Troubleshooting of cell phones, wireless routers, tablets, and other products
  • Consistently superior scores in weekly evaluations of customer reported satisfaction and call performance statistics
  • Assesses concerns including billing, policies, and general company knowledge

ABAY HELPER (Summer 2011 - November 2011)

  • Escalated call resolution and informational resource to new hire trainees
  • Leadership training including coaching methods

HAMILTON COLLEGE, ATHLETIC TRAINING ROOM

STUDENT FIRST RESPONDER (2006-2010)

  • first aid, emergency response, and basic injury management at sports matches under supervision of athletic trainer
  • clerical work and running errands

KERSHAW COUNTY COMMUNITY MEDICAL CLINIC

COMPUTER SCIENCE INTERN (summer 2009)

  • Maintained a network of computers including support of hardware and software
  • Educated staff and prepared documentation on the use of programs and basic troubleshooting
  • Launched social media
  • Contributed to and maintained the website (basic html and CSS edits)

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (NSF) PROGRAM PARTICIPANT(Summer 2008)

  • Conducted an 8 week independent project under the supervision of Dr. Charles F. Mactutus on the pharmacology associated with a rat model of the physical manifestations of schizophrenia. The results were released in the form of a written paper and oral presentation at the end of the program. The work was acknowledged in the dissertation of Dr. Landhing Moran.

HAMILTON COLLEGE, DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY

RESEARCH ASSISTANT (2006-2007)

  • performed experiments on behavioral relationships to neurotransmitter production. During the academic term, work focused on Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. Summer work involved Apis mellifera, the honeybee, and their social roles with respect to octopamine levels, a neurotransmitter.