I enjoy working on difficult problems when building backends, developer tools and appreciate the ability to create complex SQL queries for analytics. Making technology easy to use for businesses is important. Performance matters because all of your users don’t have 5G, an M1 chip or an endless cloud budget. I like to use functional programming where it makes sense. I’m a proponent of end to end encryption. My skills are focused around the Java 21 ecosystem.

Eric Balawejder
Philadelphia, PA
eric.balawejder@protonmail.com
GitHub: ericbalawejder
LinkedIn: ericbalawejder

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Technology:

• Programming languages: Java 21, SQL++, Bash
• Development tools: RESTful services with Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Spring Data JPA, Hibernate, Lombok, Git
• Build Gradle, Maven, Bamboo, CircleCI, Docker, Vagrant
• Testing JUnit, Mockito, AssertJ, Cucumber
• Operating Systems: OS X, Linux
• RDBMS: MySQL, PostgreSQL

• DBMS MongoDB, Couchbase, Redis

  • Limited use of: Typescript, Angular, Go, Kotlin, Android, Ruby, Rails

Experience:

Sr Software Engineer. Remote. Hilton. April 2022 to present

• Develop Connected Room (CR) and grow it to 1000+ properties.
• Lead the migration from DocumentDB(MongoDB) to Couchbase to create a better product experience for Connected Room.
• Create application configuration for test, stage and production environments.
• Manage SSL certificates and build custom test containers.
• Build backend services with Java, Dropwizard and Spring Boot in a microservice architecture.
• Create and maintain an end to end suite of unit and integration tests.
• Collaborate with the product, business, analytics and QA teams for business, performance and feature requirements.
• Onboard and mentor other developers.

Graduate Assistant. West Chester University. January 2015 to December 2016

• Contributed to research in artificial intelligence on a project for exploring the automatic recognition of information graphic messages conveyed in multimodal documents.
• Built a Bayesian Network model tool using the Java Netica API to predict the underlying message of an information graphic image when provided in XML form.
• Lead team development using Agile.
• Delivered presentation outlining project, impact of our results and future work at PACISE conference.
• Leading author discussing the goal of our approach, current progress, results, roadblocks and outlines future work for graphic image recognition using machine learning.
• Best Graduate Student Paper Award at PACISE conference.

Software engineer. ZeroPush. March 2015 to September 2015

• Contributed to a cross platform SaaS Rails application for sending transactional push notifications.
• Improved site reliability by adding database indexes.
• Avoided brute force logins by implementing Devise Lockable.
• Improved site reliability by serving static assets through Amazon CloudFront (CDN).
• Helped prepare for acquisition.

Projects:

Exercism.org

• Open source project using test driven development (TDD) for code challenges in 57 languages.
• Maintainer and mentor of the Java track.
• Contributed to feature additions for the latest version of Exercism.org.

Education:

West Chester University, West Chester, PA.
Master of Science in Computer Science, December 2016. GPA 3.5.

Professional Development Certificate in Computer Security. December 2016.

Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.
Bachelor of Science in Mathematics.

Peer Reviewed Publications:

• Eric Balawejder, Tyler Traub, Richard Burns. Exploring the Automatic Recognition of Pie Chart Information Messages. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of The Pennsylvania Association of Computer and Information Science Educators, pp. 52-58, 2016.
• Richard Burns, Eric Balawejder, Wiktoria Domanowska, Stephanie Elzer Schwartz, Sandra Carberry. Exploring the Types of Messages that Pie Charts Convey in Popular Media. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, pp. 265-271, 2016.