Senior Developer

Trineo was a software consultancy headquartered in Christchurch, New Zealand — a longtime Heroku specialist that Salesforce would eventually acquire outright. They hired me out of Atlanta and relocated me to their brand-new Boulder office, established to anchor their growing US client base. Working as the senior US-based engineer alongside teammates in New Zealand and Norway, our follow-the-sun setup covered clients nearly 20 hours a day — without anyone pulling overnight on-call duty.

The Ikon Pass storefront

Trineo had worked with ski resort operator Intrawest for years — through its acquisition by KSL Capital Partners and rebranding as Alterra Mountain Company — so work on the ski pass platform was underway before Alterra or the Ikon Pass had even been publicly announced. The solution was built from scratch: a Ruby on Rails backend, React frontend, and PostgreSQL, all running on Heroku, where seasonal on-sale traffic spikes were something the platform absorbed rather than a crisis we engineered around.

I joined the project team for the Ikon Pass storefront’s first sales season — the phase where integration reality hits. A ski pass isn’t a simple cart checkout; it’s an identity product with a physical footprint. Customers who bought by phone had to complete their profiles online, upload the headshot printed on their pass, and sign electronic waivers. Online purchases had to be visible instantly to in-person customer service — and vice versa. And every pass had to sync out to each resort’s entry hardware, which ranged from modern RFID gates to simple offline barcode scanners, each with its own integration quirks. I was the sole US-based engineer on the team (alongside three or four in New Zealand and one in Norway, plus a product manager and designer), making the technical calls and building the automated integration test suite that bridged the Rails backend and the Node rendering layer with Capybara.

Proof of performance, minus the Polaroids

Billboard advertising runs on Proof of Performance: evidence for the client that their ad actually went up, where and when it was supposed to. For roughly a century, that meant someone driving around the city with a camera, photographing billboards, filling out paper forms, and mailing the packet to the advertiser.

For Clear Channel Outdoor, we replaced that workflow end to end. We built the mobile-friendly capture app field crews used to photograph billboards — geo-tagged and timestamped, so the photo itself was the proof — and the client portal where advertisers logged in to see every ad buy on a map, filterable by campaign and run dates. The hundreds of labor hours saved every month were all the hours no longer spent printing, packaging, and mailing proof to clients.

Consulting is a contact sport

Our product owner framed what to build; much of how — and by when — fell to me. A regular part of my job was sitting in client meetings translating feature requests into commitments everyone could live with: when a client wanted X in Y days and that math didn’t work, negotiating the scope down or the timeline out until it did.

Two years of shipping client products on Heroku also hardened a conviction I’d been forming for a while: hosting environments are commoditized and non-value-add, and teams that specialize in business software shouldn’t be hand-rolling infrastructure. That conviction became the blueprint for the platform-as-a-service I’d go on to build at Cox Automotive.