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Hi! My name is Trevar and I am a software engineer with a strong passion for learning and building applications that make a difference. Originally from Greencastle, Indiana, I now reside in Brownsburg, Indiana with my wife Jessica and three children; Adalyn (), Blakely (), and Chloe ().
I enjoy opportunities to lead and help others grow. By teaching others I am able to expand my influence beyond what a single person can contribute. While contributing technically with NoSQL databases, JavaScript development, and Pega development I have often found myself in positions where I am organizing and leading teams in agile adoption, devops practices, and automated testing initiatives.
My weekends are filled with family activities. From going on bike rides with my oldest daughter Adalyn to driving RC cars with my youngest - Blakely, I tend to stay pretty busy. When the dust settles and the kiddos go to bed - my wife Jessica and I like to relax in the evenings talking about our day, playing games, or binging on the netflix series of the year (currently 'Criminal Minds').
Cars are a passion of mine - or more so the ability to explore and see where the road takes you. I like to explore new places, whether that means taking a different road home from work, or traveling hundreds of miles away to see what there is to see. If I had all of the time and money in the world I would probably spend a decent amount of that time traveling. My family enjoys to go on road trips when we are able.
It has been a couple of years since our last big road trip, but in 2018 we were able to go on the road trip of a lifetime seeing a great amount of the western United States. To give an idea of what I mean when I say road trip, during this excursion we covered over 6000 miles in 9 days. Starting in Indiana, we traveled to Fort Worth, Texas for a wedding. Over the next week, we experienced...
As my youngest daughter grows older we plan to get back to our adventures. Our future plans are to explore the Northeastern U.S. since my wife (who grew up in Texas) hasn't been to many of the eastern states. After that, I aim to head back north to Montana again to soak in the mountain air, then another trip exploring the far west coast through California, up to Washington. At some point I hope to drive to Alaska, and have always had a dream of buying a car just to drive south as far as I could get in to south america and fly back home.
I've always been very mechanically focused. I've always tinkered with things and grew up taking things apart and putting them back together to see how they work. This fueled by my love of racing videogames when I was younger made me in to somewhat of a gear-head.
When I was 15, my parents got me my first car: a 2000 Chevy Cavalier with a cracked engine block that I started repairing as I looked forward to being able to drive. I purchased a totalled parts car with a good engine and interior, swapped the interior components (from a different model year) into my 2000, and swapped engines replacing all major seals and components. I redid the interior to be 'cool' or as cool as I thought it was when I was 15, with speakers in the dash and painting interior panels. Some of these things that I once thought were cool, now seem somewhat juvenile, but I walked away with a plethora of knowledge, confidence, and value in good workmanship. Working on that Cavalier taught me to care for things even if they are small. It taught me hard work, and in general helped to teach me mechanical and electrical skills.
I had strong interests in high school in aeronautical engineering and was planning to go to Rose Hulman or Purdue University majoring in aeronautical or mechanical engineering. At the time, I decided to pursue a secondary passion of mine: technology. I instead majored in computer science where I could build on my problem solving and tinkering attributes. While I enjoy technology and computer science, a personal goal of mine is to tie in my technological skills into a mechanical industry through embedded systems or related area of work.
Here you can see some of my side projects that I have done.
Emaily is an application that I built after completing a fullstack JavaScript course. I took what was started with the course and extended functionality to include LinkedIn and Google oauth, custom web surveys, personal and global survey templates, advanced account page with pictures pulled from oauth sources and more! Check out my about page linked below!
Here I discuss my involvement in some professional projects organized by technology or category.
Full-stack TypeScript building Salesforce's marketing cloud 'Package Manager' application. In this role I was able to work on a team of skilled engineers building and maintaining a global application. This complex application involved a lot of dependency management and integrated with many marketing cloud apis.
MarkLogic data hub using server side javascript (not node.js but built on chrome's v8 engine). I was responsible for building out critical code for an enterprise wide data hub implemented using MarkLogic as a NoSQL data hub. In addition to contributing code, I served as the technical lead for the majority of my time on the initiative. This included automated testing, change detection and more.
Node.js custom CLI tool for MarkLogic development. I built a custom development utility which using command line questions and answers builds out boilerplate code, json file configurations, test cases, and more. This utility would build out over 30 files and 900 lines of code with just 7 inputs. This program features cached data via local files, an installation program that sets up the developer workspace, user customizable configurations, and more. After building out the application, I was able to gain team adoption where the full team was using it and contributing to the codebase.
Maintaining enterprise Java applications. This includes both JSF 'full stack' java applications as well as Java services. Some Java applications were primarily REST applications, while others had direct integrations with DB2.
Pega platform is a low-code / no-code development technology that is marketed toward rapid development, and engaging business stakeholders with visual workflows, helping relate development with the business.
I helped to establish Pega competency at my company where there was initially none internal to the company. We started by hiring Pega resources, but communication gaps and development performance quickly became a concern. I inserted myself into the process and the problems at hand helping to work through them.
In one year's time, I helped solidify a pega competency, lead a strategy for implementing devops with in our Pega development space, built out our first large production application, and achieved my Pega Certified Systems Architect and Pega Certified Senior Systems Architect
From there on I would oversee onboarding for new resources, overall Pega architecture, application maintenance, building out reusable Pega rulesets such as an advanced integration with DocuSign for company applications.
I was tasked with exploring ADA compliance for my company where we previously had no experience with. In an effort to improve our websites, I explored ADA compliance, what it means, levels of compliance, etc to educate others in our design and frontend space.
After gather necessary information on ADA compliance, I did a full audit of our websites pinpointing level of compliance by site (by compliance requirement), and illustrating next best steps to get to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance level on all sites.
Serving as Scrummaster while working at Salesforce. In this role I help manage work for the team, facilitate conversations, and find areas for improvement in our team operations while still contributing as an engineer.
Agile/Devops Adoption: Throughout 2020 and in to 2021 my project team was trying to figure out how agile and dev-ops fit in to our organization. The benefit to this was that we were building a greenfield software solution where we were able to structure our people around these concepts from the start. My involvement from this effort as a technical lead was to help guide the team and project leadership through prioritization of support (ops) tasks and not become too focused on (dev) but to see the full picture. To help reduce bugs we shifted quality left, built out extensive automated testing, and workspace validation tooling, built custom CLI tools to speed up code development, improved build pipelines and streamlined enterprise change management tasks.