Resumé

Alex's Technology Journey

2004

• Takes a Java class in high school and likes it (thanks Mr. Perfors). That class plants the idea to pursue a Bachelor's in Computer Information Systems.

2006

• Graduates from communications intelligence school at the top of his class.

2007

• Monitors world-wide sea traffic for suspicious patterns to supply risk assessments to leaders.

2009

• Incorporates a mobile coffee shop LLC with Tommy Smith and Matthew Gonzales in Denver, CO. Hosts the company website with BlueHost on WordPress. Learns HTML and CSS from scratch, then adds logic with PHP.

2010

• Mines thousands of complex technical records to ascertain threat locations while stationed in Afghanistan. Persuades senior leaders to collect data, deploy special forces, and anticipate attacks with data-driven presentations.

2014

• Graduates DeVry University with honors and a Bachelor's in Computer Information Systems.
• Writes his first lines of company code on a C# .NET MVC app called Relativity Event Handler Express (REHE) with Kezhang Wu.
• First tastes the sweet feedback of test-driven development. Learns unit testing with NUnit & RhinoMocks, advocates for mandatory testing, and sets the guidelines for the team's unit testing strategy.
• "I had the pleasure of working together with Alex on multiple development projects. He is a skilled coder and passionate about finding and implementing good design patterns. He possess some of the deepest knowledge I've seen on unit testing frameworks and he uses it to increase the quality of deliverables." - Marlon Smith

2015

• Leads the team's migration from LeanKit to Jira. Meets with team members to document all the ways our team works, then consults with Jira admins to match our workflows with the new system.
• Designs the MVP for a Relativity-based FOIA application from two conversations and a 400-page government spec. In Deloitte's hands it goes on to win the 2018 Solution Provider Innovation Award. Way to go John Fuex and John Tibbetts.

2016

• Pioneers the first technical business analyst (TBA) position. Sets the bar for client satisfaction and technical acumen. Formulates every workflow, template, and process needed to onboard the next five TBAs.

2017

• Pitches a customer success workflow to his leadership, builds it in Asana, and institutes it for his team. The design grants company-wide insight into the current technical status of 50+ clients.

2018

• Communicates the intricate steps to build a Relativity Integration Point (RIP) provider in a three-hour RelativityFest workshop with Kevin Stephenson.
• Surprises a prospective Silicon Valley client looking to integrate their Python code with RelativityOne by building a prototype IronPython integration in time to demo it live on their office tour. Great teamwork Uma Rani.
• Our first son, Graham, is born.

2019

• Consults for Clair Atkins to close a major deal in the early stages of Relativity's SaaS transformation. Leads the technical conversation at the roundtable in Nashville, TN, then systematically solves each technical barrier to crop up over the next six months. Bridges communication between the database architects (thanks Kent Salsbury), the salespeople, and the client's leaders and software architects.
• Conducts a 16-point consultation for Alexandra Hoerr's counseling startup. The capstone of my MBA, the result is 100-pages of observations, analysis, and recommendations.

2020

• Crafts a PowerShell script that simplifies collaboration and prevents build conflicts across 8+ GitLab repositories.
• Graduates Global Leadership University with a Master's in Business Administration, Entrepreneurial Studies.
• Incorporates my second business: a technology consulting firm.
• First self-hosts this website on a Raspberry Pi with a combination of Hugo, Github, Nginx, and Ansible.
• Consults with Witty Butterfly to draft the software requirements for their first product, SwordSpeak.
• "I have a fledgling tech company and hired Alex Bilson to be a project manager for our first app. We already had a prototype and wanted to add functionality to it before beta testing it. Alex was very thoughtful, detailed and thorough in evaluating my problem and presenting possible solutions. He gave me a comprehensive implementation plan with varying options with cost and time estimates. I have no tech background. Alex was able to convert highly technological ideas and processes into something I could understand and make decisions about what I wanted. The cost to implement the added functionality would’ve been a few thousand dollars. Alex recommended that I already had enough to do beta testing and that it might be better to wait until I get feedback before making changes. I appreciated his honesty and integrity. Alex keeps deadlines, is punctual and has a calming presence. I decided to go forward with beta testing and I will hire him again when I’m ready to upgrade my app. I highly recommend him." - Andrea Bacon
• Crafts a seven-page requirements document, a deployment estimate of twenty-two weeks, and a statement of work for his first project at PTCP.
• Our second son, Royal, is born.

2021

• Completes the initial requirements for my first project on time. If you're curious about what that entails, see Angular Architecture. It was a fun project.

2022

• My second major project at Performance Trust was one of my best, the Data+ Web Tool. My growing know-how with Angular development paid off in a flexible, performant, low-bug offering. In the words of Bart Smith, "This is *!$#%^ awesome!". Most of the praise for the performant engine, however, goes to our resident database whiz, Mary Mistica, for an amazing SQL Stored Procedure.
• My third major project at Performance Trust, the Call Report Parser, was given to me because I was the only one on my team proficient in Python. I leveraged a lot of skills to get this working and learned a ton. I even submitted a bug report for the Python Selenium package!

2023

• My current project at Performance Trust is the Regulatory Crawler. I'm really enjoying building out a .NET Core app from sratch and learning how to use NSwag to generate OpenAPI clients.