Jordan Benge

Jordan Benge

Application Software Developer

Available

About Me

I am a Software Developer based in Omaha, Nebraska. I graduated from Miami University (Ohio) with a degree in Computer Science. I specialize in designing and developing mobile-first web applications; be it professional freelance opportunities or personal challenges that interest me.

The things that I believe set me apart from everyone else is my passion and dedication for any project that I work on. I love the creativity and discipline that goes into Software Development and I always strive for scalable and clean code that is maintainable and readable in every project that I come in contact with.

Work Experience

Software Developer • Cujonics, LLC • (2020 - Present)

Cujonics is a software development company that specializes in building software solutions for the healthcare industry.

As a developer at Cujonics, I have been responsible for building out new features and bug fixes for the company's existing software.

My most notable accomplishments with the company to date include:

• Developing the interactive dynamic form user interface that allows companies to create unique healthcare forms digitally that can be filled out by patients digitally, without the hassle of a physical copy of the form.

• Developing the workflow engine that allows for charting software to be loaded, captured and saved to the database in real time, for patient reporting and data analysis.

Project Lead • BioAnalyt • (2020 - 2021)

BioAnalyt is a food product-innovation company based in Teltow, Germany. They focus on developing and manufacturing a portable rapid test kit, which measures the concentration of numerous vitamins in food and biological fluids.

As the lead developer at BioAnalyt, I expanded their Minimum Viable Product that was thrown together as a proof of concept, into a fully functioning consumer facing application.

My duties involved turning design concepts into functioning application features, communicating progress with the product manager, setting realistic expectations based on requests and above all else - delivering quality code within those expectations.

Data Aggregation Engineer • BrightFox • (2019 - 2020)

Brightfox is an online healthcare staffing platform that cuts out the staffing agency middlemen within the healthcare industry. As a Data Aggregation Engineer, it was my responsibility to design & develop BrightFox's creative data-extraction and transformation application. The application uses a modular design of systems that are completely independent of one another, ensuring the failure of one does not affect the success of the others.

Currently this application processes over 30 unique healthcare systems, which brings in the data from hundreds of thousands of hospital staffing positions across the nation into the BrightFox database.

Due to the volitile nature of any startup company, I had to be ready to pivor my focus at a moments notice, based on the outcome of our weekly team meetings and the success or faulure of our recent efforts.

Unfortunately, my time with BrightFox was cut short due to the economic impact that the 2020 Corona virus had on the United States.

Co Owner / Developer • DevCafe • (2019 - 2021)

DevCafe is a small collective of like-minded individuals whose focus is providing end-to-end web & app development solutions for each of our clients that allows for their unique idea to come to life and blossom.

We work with companies and teams of all sizes. From three people in a work-loft to businesses that are household names around the globe. No job is too big for DevCafe, as long as we have coffee!

DevCafe is unique in the fact that the team is not based in any one country! Our team consists of a group of *Digital Nomads* spanning a number of countries and timezones; and because of this, we understand the importance of being self-sustaining and accountable developers.

What We Offer

  • Front-end development
  • Back-end development
  • UX/UI analysis & advice
  • Product Testing & Bug Documentation
  • End-to-end, Full-stack development

Application Software Developer • WannaTrain • (2018 - August 2019)

Wanna Train is a wellness community, where anyone can meet up and workout by simply sending a “Wanna Train" invitation.

As one of the developers of Wanna Train I was responsible for implementing feature-requests, design specifications, bug resolutions, clearly communicating between the various departments of WannaTrain - be it the Testing Department, Administration or internally within the Development Team, all the while ensuring my code meets standards & has been thoroughly vetted before submission.

WannaTrain is unique in the fact that the development team is not based in the United States - or even the company itself! The team consists of a group of Digital Nomads spanning a number of countries and timezones.

Working here taught me the importance of being a self-sustaining and accountable developer; because if I ran into a problem at 9:00 AM EST, I had no one but myself to help solve it until around 9:00 PM - 11:00 PM EST.

Similarly, if some of my code does not pass review, I would not know about it until a couple of days later, due to timezone constraints, potentially missing deadlines.

This means that I had to be certain that I wrote code that will hold up to specifications & expectations.

Co-Founder & Lead Developer • SocialPnt • (2017 - 2019)

SocialPnt is a location-based social media app, that brings users together through pnts (points) in time. Users can discover what is going on around them, stay in touch with the people who matter the most and capture & relive every moment again and again.

I built SocialPnt from the ground up, learning on the way what it really takes to create a end-to-end mobile application from start to finish. SocialPnt covers six different programming languages, has over 45 service providers, 84 individual pages, countless components and numerous technological integrations.

SocialPnt has been my pride and joy for a little more than a year now. It started with whiteboard drawings, copious amounts of chicken-scratched notes and lots caffeine. It then moved to Sketch design mockups, proof of concepts, technology selection, and about six months of solo development & testing.

SocialPnt is live on the IOS App store, but there isn't a day that goes by, that I don't think of new ways I could improve upon it. Optimizations, new implementations, integrations and a better tomorrow for everyone who uses the app, is always my goal.

SocialPnt was a daunting task that I wasn't confident I would be able to complete in the beginning, but eventually - I did. And I cannot tell you how great that feels.

Application Software Developer • University of Cincinnati, Office of Research • (January 2016 - January 2017)

As a Developer at UC I was responsible for the technical direction of projects throughout the development lifecycle. This included keeping thorough documentation on projects status, development and team work-ability.

I was on the ground floor when it came to re-designing the Office of Research website, a project that I pushed for almost immediately upon coming into my role. I spent a lot of days in meetings, with every department head discussing their needs, and how we could implement them in a way that made it easy to find any information that you were looking for.

Junior Software Developer • Athletic Performance Tools, LLC • (Summer 2014)

I helped our team solve new and interesting problems, using a wide variety of technologies to tackle these problems including, AngularJS, HTML, CSS, Javascript and external Api's. With a small focused team, we all shared the successes of one another. This personal investment allowed me to interact with a new and growing team in an environment that I had never experienced before. Though my time with the company was short, due to my constraints of being a student, the things that I learned were invaluable.

Featured Projects

PDKP - PantheonDKP

A currency accounting system that tracks income, expenses and other activities in real time.

PDKP - PantheonDKP

PDKP is a currency management & tracking tool with over 10,000 users that I built for my World of Warcraft raiding guild, Pantheon - hence the name.

What started with the hubris filled phase of "How hard can it be?" turned into one of my greatest learning endeavors.

Now, it might not seem as impressive of a project now that you know that it was made for a video game, but I don't think that should discredit the architecture, design and coding work that I put into it.

Project Challenges I Overcame

  • Learning a dead language: LUA 5.1 is a dead language by all accounts. Most people within the community have been programming in it for 10+ years, and almost all resources available for it are antiquated and outdated. This requires you to "learn" by diving into the depths of other project tools that the community has created.
  • Keeping accurate records: Keeping one database up to date and accurate is easy, but keeping 300+ copies of that database up to date and accurate is pretty hard I learned. This is because World of Warcraft does not allow outside communication for their tools & can only be updated when the player is online.
  • Performance limitations: As I established, keeping records is important. Everyone wants to know how much currency that they have accumulated, and to know that it's accurate. Doing so, requires that you sync data from the most "up to date" database, to everyone else that is online, without affecting their gameplay performance.
  • Database size creep:Unlike Google, I did not have the luxury of seemingly unlimited data. I had to be careful when designing the database architecture because loading screens within the game are adversely affected by O(N) data. In short, the more data entries that I acquired, the longer the game took to load during various loading screens.
  • Utilizing a semi-broken API:Lastly, the entirety of the WoW API has been documented by the community. That means that there isn't an official documentation of it, and a lot of the examples (if there are any) are out of date. You have to do a lot of trial and error on your own to find out what endpoints actually function the way they are supposed to.
  • Merging data from multiple sources:CRUD data management is easy at it's core. It's when you are faced with the challenge of doing so from multiple sources that may have conflicting or missing data is when it becomes an issue.

Languages

PDKP is written in XML and LUA 5.1, while also utilizing custom made BLP & TGAasset files.

SocialPnt - IOS App

A location-based social network that connects people through places.

SocialPnt - IOS App

Users can engage with their friends’ past, present, and future through the use of distinct Pnts located in popular locations. Now available on the App store for free!

Framework, services and more

SocialPnt leverages the Ionic framework to give a cross-platform mobile experience. It utilizes Google Firebase, and their Cloud Firestore service for it's database purposes, as well as Google Cloud Functions to offload some of the more sensitive, and intensive data processing tasks to a dedicated Google Cloud instance.

Languages

Socialpnt is written in Typescript, HTML and SCSS with custom Apache Cordova plugins written in Swift , Objective-C and Javascript.

IPA - Ionic Plugin Assistant

A NodeJs library that generates the necessary boilerplate for creating Ionic/Cordova plugins

IPA - Ionic Plugin Assistant

IPA was made to make the average Ionic developers life a little easier, when wanting to create the own plugin for the Ionic Framework. Creating a plugin takes a LOT initial setup. I've written Medium articles about how to properly setup plugins, but I felt like even with that, the process was too convoluted for some.

So instead, I wanted to make the process easier - so I created the Ionic Plugin Assistant - IPA for short. Creating the package also made my life easier, because despite writing about the topic, I'm human and forget some of the steps, and often have to Google specifics - which lead me to my article.

When you run IPA, it will ask you a few questions about your plugin, such as: the plugin name, the authors name, github repo, license, etc... and then generate all of the boilerplate code, to the point that you could technically submit it to the Ionic Native platform as a new plugin - but it would probably be denied for a lack of functionality.

IPA ensures that your plugin will adhere to the Ionic plugin standards, common community standards, and set you up for success when it comes to making your plugin. This isn't to say that it will write your plugin for you, but it will give you a basic setup to get started with, where there was none to begin with.

The library generates 11 files, all with unique requirements to properly work in your specific platform & within the Ionic Framework

I opened-sourced IPA under the MIT license.

Languages

IPA is written in NodeJs and Javascript.

Services, Integrations and more

IPA utilizes Travis Continuous Integration for consistent deployment, Mocha for Unit Testing (with a 87% code coverage reported by CodeCov!), with Webpack and Babel used during the build phase.

View on GitHub

NOLS - No One Likes Stylesheets

A NodeJs library that makes writing pixel perfect CSS a breeze

NOLS - No One Likes Stylesheets

NOLS was a proof of concept NodeJs package that I came up with after getting tired of making pixel-to-viewport conversions by hand, as in a large project you could potentially have dozens of small conversions that need to be done.

With NOLS at your side you can have the peace of mind of knowing that your pixel perfect CSS looks the same on all devices.

Other Node packages allow you to calculate a conversion, but none actually help you streamline your development process by applying the conversion in your stylesheets for you.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you are aware, NOLS' goal does not really translate all that well to the web world. It's better handled by utilizing CSS-Grid or Flexbox rather than viewport percentages. However, it was a fun little project to play around with, so I don't regret creating it.

I opened-sourced IPA under the MIT license.

Languages

NOLS is written in NodeJs and Javascript

Services, Integrations and more

NOLS utilizes Travis Continuous Integration for consistent deployment, Mocha for Unit Testing (with a 95% code coverage reported by CodeCov!), with Webpack and Babel used during the build phase.

View on GitHub

Projects

LastCam - An Ionic-Cordova Camera Plugin written in Swift

LastCam - An Ionic-Cordova Camera Plugin written in Swift

LastCam is a plugin I created after finding some of the alternatives within the Ionic community to be lacking. It utilizes a user's camera to create a preview that is streamed straight from their phone, into any HTML view that they want.

The thing that makes LastCam special is it's ability to capture both videos and images, while other plugins only offer one or the other.

Languages

LastCam is written in Swift, Javascript and Objective-C

License

It is open-sourced under the MIT license, and all are more than welcome to contribute.

View on GitHub

Ionic 4 - Components Repository

Ionic 4 - Components Repository • Abandoned

The Ionic 4 Components repository is a revival of the now dead Ionic 3 Components Github repo. It's aim is the same, to help people learn and speed up their development process with a curated list of advanced, unique, but often required components and functionality that is missing within the Ionic 4 Framework.

License

It is open-sourced under the MIT license, and all are more than welcome to contribute.

YTrap - IOS App

YTrap - IOS App • Abandoned

YTrap is a simple mobile app review system designed to allow the attendees of an event to give an honest yet anonymous review of the event without outing themselves. This allows hosts to facilitate better events in the future.

YTrap was the first mobile app that I made. After careful consideration I made the decision to shut the app down, after some privacy concerns with the Facebook Developer API, which fueled the application.

Freedom Summer App - IOS & Android App

Freedom Summer App - IOS & Android App • Abandoned

The Freedom Summer App (FSApp) is a location-based tour that uses a mobile device and GPS technology to transport you to 1964 where you train as a Freedom Summer volunteer on Miami University's campus in Oxford, Ohio.

Languages

FSApp is built using the open-source project ARIS, written in PHP and Objective-C. It leverages augmented reality to immerse the user into the rich history of the Freedom Summer, while using real-time image recognition to project historical images onto the user's screen at certain locations. The app is currently in Beta, and only available to pre-approved testers.

License

It is open-sourced under the MIT license, and all are more than welcome to contribute.

Other Projects

Toggl Invoice Generator • Private

This was a quality of life improvement type of project for me. My team and I use Toggl to track our hours for working remotely, but Toggl requires a premium account for invoice generation, and even then, the invoices were not all that nice to look at. Since I do not control the team account, I was left with having to generate my invoices each week by hand.

This was a necessary evil, and often I dreaded having to do it. A lot goes into proper invoice generation for our company - calculating each individual task's hourly rate, calculating the total invoice cost and time, updating the appropriate dates and payout periods, bumping the invoice number, etc... all in all, it would take me about an hour or two every two weeks, depending on how many tickets I cleared that pay period, but I always dreaded it.

So I decided one day that I was tired of generating the invoices by hand, and set out to try and automate it for myself. Toggl's documentation is really nice, but the hardest part was properly filling out my invoice template that I had gotten attached to over time.

After a few hours of trial and error (Python and DocX files don't like each-other when tables are involved), I streamlined that process from an hour or two every two weeks to about three seconds. Now it automatically pulls my work hours from the last two weeks, using the Toggl API, generates the invoice, increments the invoice number, totals the hours, calculates my hourly rate for each item I worked on and then updates a local database with the relevant information for archival purposes. Now all I have do to is drag the file into Google Drive, and send it off to my boss to get paid.

Languages

The Toggl Invoice Generator is written in Python, and utilizes the Toggl API, and a custom DocX template of my creation.

Deluge to Transmission Migration Assistant • Public

This was a little program I created, because I discovered that the Linux torrenting client (Deluge) was a bit lacking in what I wanted it to do - scheduled throttling being a big one, and as a result wanted to switch to Transmission as my torrent client.

When I went to switch to Transmission, I realized that I had forgot to select a setting in Deluge called "Make a copy of torrents", before adding some odd 200+ torrents. Instead of manually adding all 200+ torrents to the Transmission client, I decided to figure out how to automate that process for myself & others.

Languages

This project was written in Python, and leverages the Selenium Chrome Driver to automate adding magnet links to their web interface.

Open Source Contributions

Compodoc • Package Contribution

I was working on creating documentation for a large-scale project I was working on using Storyboard, which uses Compodoc internally. As with any large project, we used Alias'd paths, but Compodoc was not set up to read the aliases correctly.

So after diving into the library and discovering what the problem was, I submitted a pull-request on Compodoc - which hadn't been updated in quite a while. After a few days, the pull-request was merged, and our documentation was created.

Find out more if interested

Ionic • Feature Contribution

This was a quality of life upgrade that I felt was lacking within the Ionic Framework.

The feature was a custom-ion-video element that allowed you to auto-play or pause videos when pass through the viewport.

Unfortunately, the feature was not merged into the Ionic Framework, due to the team feeling that it was unnecessary and could be reproduced by users without the need for a custom element.

Find out more if interested

Branch.io • Cross API integration / Documentation

This was probably the first time that I felt like a true developer. I was looking to integrate Firebase's Dynamic Link service into SocialPnt. After implementing their native SDK, I realized that their coverage of edge cases was significantly lacking. After searching around for a bit, I discovered Branch.io and immediately fell in love with their service. There was only one catch. I had to get an email link from Firebase, which was only accessible via their Dynamic Link service.

After doing some digging I came up with a solution that leveraged Branch.io's edge cases with Firebase's email link, and was given warm remarks from one of the Branch.io developers for my work. He said he would pass my solution onto their documentation team to see if it could be added to the repository, as he felt that other developers would benefit from it.

Find out more if interested

Ionic • Long-standing issue documentation

This was an issue that I originally opened with the Ionic team, but despite receiving quite some notoriety within the community it was unfortunately left unsolved. The issue was with their Ionic cordova build prod command running out of memory, even on high-end devices. This was due to one of the optimizations that the command was running. The flag was causing a memory-leak within some of their dependencies and the recursive use of non-project file-paths.

This issue was only prevalent in large-scale projects, and would not be noticed by beginners or simpler applications.

After three months of testing out fixes and hoping that the team would address this issue officially, I came up with a solution that solved the issue at large. Later on ths issue was fixed in their 4.0 release of Ionic, but for 3.x users like myself, the compiled solution worked in the meantime.

Find out more if interested

Cordova-Plugin-Camera-Preview • Solution documentation

This was something that I originally ran into while using the Camera-Preview plugin. The basis of the issue was with implementing a pinch-to-zoom directive, when you couldn't interact with the camera preview directly due to library limitations.

I ended up posting this solution for another user who opened the same issue that I encountered while originally implementing the plugin.

Find out more if interested

Ionic3-components • UI Theme update

The Ionic3-Components library is a fantastic resource for new Ionic users to find all sorts non-intuitive UI examples.

I worked on some stylistic issues that the library had, as well as refactoring the repository as a whole to make it more streamlined for user-use. My pull request is still open, waiting for the project to come out of inactivity.

Find out more if interested