Jake Gaylor – Teach your LLM about me

How to Use

AI assistants can connect to this server to learn more about me and my work.

SSE (Most Common, Deprecated) https://ai.jakegaylor.com/sse
Streamable HTTP Endpoint (Modern) https://ai.jakegaylor.com/mcp

To connect to this server with tools that do not support remote MCP servers, you can use the following commands:

Add this configuration to your Claude config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "jake-gaylor-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@jhgaylor/me-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Add this configuration to your Cursor settings

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "jake-gaylor-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@jhgaylor/me-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Configure Windsurf to connect

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "jake-gaylor-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@jhgaylor/me-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Set up Zed MCP server configuration

{
  "context_servers": {
    "jake-gaylor-mcp": {
      "settings": {},
      "command": {
        "path": "npx",
        "args": ["-y", "@jhgaylor/me-mcp"]
      }
    }
  }
}

For clients that support direct HTTP connections:

Connect to: https://ai.jakegaylor.com/mcp
Use standard MCP protocol methods to interact with the server
No local installation required - the server is already hosted and ready to use

Example TypeScript connection code

import { Client } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/client/index.js";
import { StreamableHTTPClientTransport } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/client/streamableHttp.js";

async function connectToMCP() {
  const baseUrl = new URL("https://ai.jakegaylor.com/mcp");
  
  try {
    const client = new Client({ name: 'example-mcp-client', version: '1.0.0' });
    const transport = new StreamableHTTPClientTransport(baseUrl);
    await client.connect(transport);
    console.log("Connected to MCP server!");
    const resumeResource = await client.getResource("candidate-info://resume-text");
    console.log("Resume:", resumeResource.contents[0].text);
    const githubUrl = await client.callTool({ toolName: "get_github_url", args: {} });
    console.log("GitHub URL:", githubUrl.content[0].text);
  } catch (error) {
    console.error("Failed to connect to MCP server:", error);
  }
}
connectToMCP();

Looking for the quickest way to learn about me? The section below contains my complete resume information that you can copy with one click and paste directly to any AI assistant. No tools or special connections needed - this is the simplest way for an AI to get comprehensive information about my background.

Quick Resume Information (copy-paste to your LLM)

Copy the text below and paste it directly to your AI assistant to give it information about my background:

# Jake Gaylor
                
## Professional Summary
Jake Gaylor is an experienced software engineer with nearly 15 years of experience working across the web stack. He specializes in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and platform engineering with particular expertise in Kubernetes, GitOps, and immutable infrastructure. Jake has strong experience with AWS, containerization technologies, and building CI/CD pipelines.

## Current Position
- Staff SWE, Office of the CEO at Cloaked Inc (August 2023-Present)
  - Creating programs to ingest ideas from across the company
  - Working with executives, product management, and marketing to develop marketable ideas
  - Documenting ideation processes

## Previous Experience
- Staff Platform Engineer at Cloaked Inc (September 2022-August 2023)
  - Migrated software stacks from PaaS providers to AWS EKS
  - Implemented Cloudflare for third-party masking and control
  - Established deployment patterns for Kubernetes and edge networks
  - Migrated AWS account structure to meet compliance requirements (SOC2, ISO 27001/27701)

- Owner/Co-GM at The Onward Store Steakhouse (October 2021-January 2024)
  - Managed physical infrastructure, HR, legal, vendor relationships
  - Developed processes for serving fresh food

- Staff SWE in Developer Experience at Inception Health (June 2020-June 2022)
  - Built AWS infrastructure with CDK packages for HIPAA compliance
  - Trained teams on serverless environments and gRPC contracts

- Senior Platform Engineer at CyberGRX (December 2018-June 2020)
  - Led cloud-native CI/CD pipelines for AWS and Kubernetes
  - Developed custom CoreOS operator for blue/green deployments
  - Mentored engineers on software deployment best practices

- Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at CardFree (January 2018-December 2018)
  - Managed PCI-compliant C# installation in AWS
  - Established software building practices and incident response

- Senior DevOps Engineer at ProtectWise, Inc (August 2016-January 2018)
  - SRE for large-scale data ingestion platform with thousands of Cassandra nodes
  - Managed $10M+/year AWS production environment using Infrastructure as Code

- DevOps Engineer at Food Service Warehouse (June 2015-March 2016)
  - Built Kubernetes clusters on vSphere using CoreOS, fleet, etcd, flannel

- Software Developer at Mississippi State University (June 2010-June 2014)
  - Created grant proposals for custom software
  - Supported research initiatives including tracking "human sensors" during natural disasters

## Technical Skills
- Programming Languages: JavaScript, Python, Bash, Go, Ruby
- Databases: Neo4j, PostgreSQL, Timestream, MongoDB, Redis, Etcd, Zookeeper, Cassandra, DynamoDB
- Distributed Systems: Argo Workflows, Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS IoT
- Automation: Argo CD, Packer, Terraform, Vagrant, Linux, Chef, GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions
- Orchestration: Kubernetes, Fleet, Docker
- Monitoring: Prometheus, CloudWatch, Sensu, PagerDuty, Logstash, Kibana, Grafana, Graphite

## Professional Philosophy
Jake focuses on:
- Shipping fast and learning fast
- Delivering MVP in days rather than months
- Data-driven iterations and continuous user feedback
- Supercharging teams with best-in-class development workflows
- Automated testing and deployment
- Finding product-market fit through data-driven feature development

## Entrepreneurial Background
Jake describes himself as a "serial entrepreneur" having worked with:
- SaaS products
- PaaS solutions
- Physical products
- Restaurant management

## Contact Information
- Phone: 720.453.3994
- Email: jhgaylor@gmail.com
- Website: http://jakegaylor.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/jhgaylor
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jhgaylor
- Work Preference: Remote First, Will Travel

You can also access this information at llms.txt or via https://ai.jakegaylor.com/llms.txt

For Talent Evaluators

I've built this MCP server to help a wide range of people evaluate whether I might be a good fit for their needs:

Recruiters: Ask about my experience, skills, and background directly.
Hiring managers: Drill into my proficiency in specific technologies. Example: "What's Jake's proficiency level with React, TypeScript, and AWS?"
Interview coordinators: Generate tailored phone screens and take-home questions. Example: "Create a phone screen for Jake around API design and testing."
Career coaches: Pull my resume, GitHub stats, and website content for assessments. Example: "Generate a summary of Jake's career highlights."
Anyone evaluating my fit: Use the prompt: "Is Jake a good fit for my role? [paste job description]"
Product managers & designers: Understand how I collaborate on product vision and feature prioritization. Example: "How would Jake contribute to our feature roadmap development?"
Startup founders & small teams: Assess my fit as a generalist in lean environments. Example: "Would Jake be a good fit for a full-stack generalist role at an early-stage startup?"

💡 Pro Tip: Connect your AI assistant to this MCP server using the instructions above, then have it analyze my experience against your specific requirements to streamline your evaluation process.

Get a Complete Candidate Assessment

Once connected, your AI assistant can provide a thorough evaluation of my candidacy:

Skills Assessment

Ask about specific technologies or skills mentioned in your job description and get an analysis of my experience level with each.

Example: "What is Jake's proficiency level with React, TypeScript, and AWS?"

Business Impact

Understand how my background could translate to impact in your organization based on my previous roles and accomplishments.

Example: "How could Jake contribute to our e-commerce platform optimization efforts?"

Strengths & Growth Areas

Get insights into which aspects of your role I would likely excel at, and where I might need support or development.

Example: "Based on our senior developer role, what are Jake's strengths and potential growth areas?"

Phone Screen Generator

Generate customized interview questions that focus on the specific unknowns or areas you want to explore further.

Example: "Create a phone screen for Jake focused on system design and leadership skills."

Take Action

If you're using the hosted version at ai.jakegaylor.com/mcp, you can have your AI assistant contact me directly:

The assistant can compose an email based on your role and my qualifications, which you can review and send. This helps create a personalized outreach that highlights the specific reasons why your opportunity might align with my background.

Example: Ask your assistant: "Please draft an email to Jake about our [position name] role and why he might be a good fit."

Technical Deep Dive

Walk through core technologies in your stack, explore my project work via the GitHub MCP server, and discuss design trade-offs:

Example: "Give me a code walk-through of Jake's use of AWS Lambda in his last project and ask him to explain the trade-offs."

Onboarding & Ramp Roadmap

Generate a 30-60-90-day plan based on my background and your team's goals:

Example: "Create a 90-day onboarding roadmap for Jake joining as a senior platform engineer."

Growth & Development Plan

Identify skill gaps and suggest learning paths or stretch projects:

Example: "What areas should Jake focus on to become our next team lead, and what projects could we assign him?"

Reference Simulation

Auto-generate reference-check questions or simulate testimonial responses:

Example: "Create three reference-check questions about Jake's leadership and history of delivering results."

What is MCP

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardized way for AI models to communicate with external services to request information or execute actions, enabling them to stay up-to-date and perform tasks beyond their training data.

This MCP server provides two key capabilities:

Resources: Static information about me, including my resume, LinkedIn profile, GitHub profile, and personal website content.
Tools: Functions that AI models can call to retrieve specific information about my background, skills, and experience.

By connecting to this MCP server, AI assistants can access up-to-date information about me.

💡 Note: This server follows the Model Context Protocol specification, making it compatible with various AI assistants and tools that support MCP.

Resources: Static data my application exposes and that you or your assistant can fetch directly (e.g., resume text, website content).
Tools: Callable actions that AI models can invoke to retrieve information or perform tasks (e.g., get_resume_text, get_github_url).

Features

This MCP server provides the following features:

Resources

candidate-info://resume-text: Resume content as text

{ "meta": { "themeOptions": { "colors": { "background": [ "#ffffff", "#191e23" ], "dimmed": [ "#f3f4f5", "#23282d" ], "primary": [ "#191e23", "#fbfbfc" ], "secondary": [ "#6c7781", "#ccd0d4" ], "accent": [ "#46b450", "#47d153" ] } }, "theme": "even" }, "basics": { "name": "Jake Gaylor", "label": "Senior Software Engineer & Product Founder | End-to-End Product Development & Go-to-Market", "image": "", "email": "jhgaylor@gmail.com", "phone": "720.453.3994", "url": "https://jakegaylor.com", "summary": "15+ years building and shipping products at scale—from founding SaaS ventures to architecting AI-powered platforms. I combine deep SWE expertise with business leadership to drive product vision, go-to-market strategy, and revenue growth.", "location": { "address": "", "postalCode": "", "city": "", "countryCode": "US", "region": "Remote First, Will Travel" }, "profiles": [ { "network": "GitHub", "username": "jhgaylor", "url": "https://github.com/jhgaylor" }, { "network": "LinkedIn", "username": "jhgaylor", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhgaylor/" } ] }, "work": [ { "name": "Cloaked Inc", "position": "Staff SWE, Office of the CEO", "url": "https://cloaked.app", "startDate": "2023-08", "summary": "Spearheaded executive-level innovation by developing autonomous AI agents and a cross-functional ideation portal—driving a highly sticky, AI-powered onboarding experience that boosted user adoption and retention and defined governance processes", "highlights": [ "Developed autonomous AI agents using LangChain to automate user account management tasks such as auto change password, auto login, and auto change email", "Leveraged these AI agents as a core fundraising narrative and created a highly sticky, AI-powered onboarding experience that significantly boosted user adoption and retention", "Designed and launched a cross-functional ideation portal engaging design, customer success, engineering, product development, and executive teams with transparent status tracking", "Partnered with design, product, engineering, marketing, customer success, and co-founders to validate, refine, and ship concepts into market-ready features", "Defined and documented cross-functional roles, ceremonies, and governance processes to unify ideation and accelerate product delivery across the organization" ] }, { "name": "Cloaked Inc", "position": "Staff Platform Engineer", "url": "https://cloaked.app", "startDate": "2022-09", "endDate": "2023-08", "summary": "Oversaw strategic AWS EKS migration and architected enterprise deployment governance, compliance frameworks, and GitOps CI/CD pipelines to enhance security, scalability, and developer productivity", "highlights": [ "Defined and executed a strategic migration roadmap transitioning legacy PaaS platforms to AWS EKS, driving cost reduction and scalability", "Collaborated with cross-functional leadership to implement a Cloudflare control plane, enhancing security posture and resilience", "Architected and led adoption of a multi-account AWS hub-and-spoke model, ensuring SOC2, ISO 27001, and 27701 compliance", "Established enterprise Kubernetes and edge deployment standards, mentoring engineering teams in best practices and governance", "Spearheaded design and implementation of a GitOps-based CI/CD pipeline, accelerating deployments by 30x", "Partnered with product and analytics teams to develop an end-to-end analytics stack, enabling data-driven decision-making" ] }, { "name": "The Onward Store Steakhouse", "position": "Owner / Co-GM", "startDate": "2021-10", "endDate": "2024-01", "summary": "Owned and managed a full-service steakhouse with 7 staff, generating $500K in annual revenue and overseeing P&L, operations, and vendor relations.", "highlights": [ "Led a team of 7 employees, handling recruitment, training, scheduling, and performance management.", "Directed all facets of business operations, achieving $500K in annual revenue through strategic inventory management and cost control.", "Designed and implemented operational processes for facility maintenance, vendor partnerships, and quality assurance, driving consistent customer satisfaction.", "Managed P&L, budgets, and financial reporting, optimizing expenses and improving profit margins.", "Executed marketing and community engagement initiatives to increase local brand awareness and repeat patronage." ] }, { "name": "Inception Health", "position": "Staff SWE in Developer Experience", "startDate": "2020-06", "endDate": "2022-06", "summary": "Architected AWS CDK infrastructure and tooling for HIPAA-compliant patient care microservices", "highlights": [ "Led delivery of AWS CDK infrastructure for patient care microservices platform, ensuring HIPAA compliance and deep AWS integration", "Collaborated with AWS and partner teams to integrate managed services and accelerate platform development", "Championed CDK usage across application tiers, designing IaC patterns for teams to consume and interact with the platform", "Implemented CI/CD pipelines for mobile apps, automating TestFlight and App Store releases through Git, enabling self-serve deployments", "Trained and mentored product and mobile development teams on CDK, serverless architectures, and CI/CD workflows, fostering autonomy" ] }, { "name": "CyberGRX (now ProcessUnity)", "position": "Senior Platform Engineer", "url": "https://www.cybergrx.com", "startDate": "2018-12", "endDate": "2020-06", "summary": "Led cloud-native CI/CD vision and implementation for AWS and Kubernetes", "highlights": [ "Led vision on cloud-native CI/CD pipelines for AWS and Kubernetes", "Developed custom resource using CoreOS operator SDK for orchestrating blue/green deployments", "Redesigned build and deploy process that dramatically improved team productivity", "Mentored software engineers in best practices for building and deploying software", "Grew into Staff Engineer role by owning large-scope initiatives, collaborating with the Tech Lead to drive interactions across the organization and unblock progress" ] }, { "name": "Cardfree", "position": "Senior Cloud Platform Engineer", "startDate": "2018-01", "endDate": "2018-12", "summary": "Managed large-scale PCI-compliant C# installation in AWS", "highlights": [ "Managed a large-scale PCI-compliant C# installation in AWS", "Architected hybrid AMI build and deploy platform using Packer and Vagrant, enabling consistent Windows and Linux EC2 deployments for C# and Ruby services", "Standardized infrastructure-as-code practices to pave the way for open-source .NET migration", "Developed and launched a structured PCI-compliant incident response program, replacing ad-hoc Slack alerts with a streamlined IR workflow without excessive paperwork" ] }, { "name": "Protectwise, Inc (Acquired by Verizon)", "position": "Senior DevOps Engineer", "startDate": "2016-08", "endDate": "2018-01", "summary": "Operated SRE for petabyte-scale data ingestion platform", "highlights": [ "Managed SRE for massive scale data ingestion platform with thousands of Cassandra nodes and petabytes in S3", "Administered $10M+/yr production AWS environment using Infrastructure as Code" ] }, { "name": "Food Service Warehouse", "position": "DevOps Engineer", "startDate": "2015-06", "endDate": "2016-03", "summary": "Built Kubernetes clusters on vSphere using CoreOS technologies", "highlights": [ "Implemented Kubernetes clusters on vSphere using CoreOS, fleet, etcd, and flannel", "Accelerated release cycles for Node.js services with container orchestration" ] }, { "name": "Mississippi State University", "position": "Software Developer", "startDate": "2010-06", "endDate": "2014-06", "summary": "Created grant proposals and custom software for research initiatives", "highlights": [ "Created grant proposals to fund custom software for university research initiatives", "Developed software for tracking 'human sensors' through natural disasters including Hurricane Sandy" ] } ], "volunteer": [], "education": [], "awards": [], "certificates": [], "publications": [], "skills": [ { "name": "AI Engineering", "level": "Advanced", "keywords": [ "LangChain", "Crewai", "Custom Agent Framework", "MCP Servers", "LLM Integration" ] }, { "name": "Cloud Infrastructure", "level": "Expert", "keywords": [ "AWS", "Kubernetes", "EKS", "GKE", "vSphere", "Terraform", "Infrastructure as Code", "Cloudflare" ] }, { "name": "CI/CD & DevOps", "level": "Expert", "keywords": [ "GitOps", "ArgoCD", "Argo Workflows", "Jenkins", "Github Actions", "Gitlab CI", "Continuous Deployment" ] }, { "name": "Programming Languages", "level": "Advanced", "keywords": [ "Javascript", "Python", "Bash", "Go", "Ruby", "Dart" ] }, { "name": "Databases", "level": "Advanced", "keywords": [ "Neo4j", "PostgreSQL", "Timestream", "MongoDB", "Redis", "Etcd", "Zookeeper", "Cassandra", "DynamoDB" ] }, { "name": "Distributed Systems", "level": "Expert", "keywords": [ "Kafka", "RabbitMQ", "AWS IoT", "Big Data", "Spark", "EMR" ] }, { "name": "Monitoring", "level": "Advanced", "keywords": [ "Prometheus", "CloudWatch", "Sensu", "Pagerduty", "Logstash", "Kibana", "Grafana", "Graphite" ] }, { "name": "Product Engineering", "level": "Expert", "keywords": [ "Data-driven Iteration", "Feature Development", "User Feedback Loops", "MVP Development", "Product Analytics" ] }, { "name": "Product & Business", "level": "Advanced", "keywords": [ "Roadmapping", "Customer Discovery", "P&L Management", "Go-to-Market Strategy", "Fundraising" ] } ], "languages": [ { "language": "English", "fluency": "Native speaker" } ], "interests": [], "references": [ { "name": "Director Platform Engineering, Cloaked", "reference": "Jake is a force for good unlike any other. He migrated our infra to a cheaper and more scalable system, crafted a CI pipeline that accelerated deploys by 30x, and taught the whole company how to make data-driven decisions by building and showcasing an entire product analytics stack. And that was just his first 6 months." }, { "name": "Software Engineer, CyberGRX", "reference": "I watched Jake redo a build and deploy process over the span of 3 days, whip up a presentation, and get every engineer in the org up to speed using it to deploy new services, a moment I'll never forget because our productivity EXPLODED afterwards." }, { "name": "Senior Platform Engineer, Inception Health", "reference": "I also wanted to second (third? Fourth?) Jake's skills here. I don't have anything unique to add as everyone else has already covered it, but this man will help you achieve what you need." }, { "name": "Magician, Magic", "reference": "Jake worked in the pit with [the operations team] and everyday came in with killer energy. Everyone else told us how to work around problems. Jake built us better tools." }, { "name": "DevOps Engineer, Protectwise", "reference": "Jake was instrumental in building our cloud-native security platform. His technical leadership helped shape our architecture and team practices." } ], "projects": [ { "name": "MCP Working Group Contributions", "description": "Active participant in Model Context Protocol (MCP) community development", "highlights": [ "Member of the MCP Hosting Working Group", "Developed strategies for deploying and running MCP servers at scale", "Contributed to Dart SDK, Express tool for binding to MCP servers", "Developed various MCP servers (Hirebase, Candidate Job Search, Text Extraction)", "Created GitOps tool for MCP deployments", "Operate publicly available MCP servers for community testing" ], "url": "https://github.com/jhgaylor" }, { "name": "CareerFlick LLM-Driven Mobile App", "description": "Developed a mobile application with a Tinder-like LLM interface", "highlights": [ "Built intuitive swipe-based interface for interacting with LLMs", "Implemented AI-driven content generation and response system", "Created responsive mobile-first user experience" ] }, { "name": "Hirebase MCP Server", "description": "A Python MCP server for Hirebase.org's API", "highlights": [ "Built a Python-based Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for searching jobs on Hirebase.org", "Dockerized the service and set up GitOps CI/CD pipelines for automated builds and releases" ], "url": "https://github.com/jhgaylor/hirebase-mcp" }, { "name": "Express MCP Handler", "description": "Package to simplify MCP handling in Express.js", "highlights": [ "Developed Express middleware in TypeScript to streamline MCP request handling", "Authored full type definitions and robust error handling for production-grade reliability", "Configured CI/CD pipelines to automate code validation and package publishing" ], "url": "https://github.com/jhgaylor/express-mcp-handler" }, { "name": "Node Candidate MCP Server", "description": "A TypeScript library to build customizable candidate MCP servers", "highlights": [ "Authored a reusable library enabling developers to integrate their own candidate data into MCP flows", "Published as an npm package for easy adoption and extension by other teams" ], "url": "https://github.com/jhgaylor/node-candidate-mcp-server" }, { "name": "mcp_dart", "description": "Dart SDK implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)", "highlights": [ "Contributed stream based support for in-process MCP servers", "Add support for running MCP servers in flutter apps", "Authored Dart examples to accelerate SDK adoption" ], "url": "https://github.com/leehack/mcp_dart" } ] }

candidate-info://resume-url: URL to the resume

https://jakegaylor.com/resume/

candidate-info://linkedin-url: LinkedIn profile URL

https://linkedin.com/in/jhgaylor

candidate-info://github-url: GitHub profile URL

https://github.com/jhgaylor

candidate-info://website-url: Personal website URL

https://jakegaylor.com

candidate-info://website-text: Content from the personal website

Available to Hire Your Next Technical Cofounder 15+ years of experience helping companies build better tech organizations, launch new products, and grow with confidence. Text Me Email Me View Resume How I Accelerate Success Ship Fast, Learn Fast Focus on delivering the first quantum of value quickly, then iterate based on real user feedback. MVP in days, not months Data-driven iterations Continuous user feedback loops Supercharge Your Teams Deliver faster with proven tools and practices that scale across your organization. Best-in-class development workflows Automated testing and deployment Cost-effective scaling solutions Find Product Market Fit Transform engineering teams into product teams that own the full lifecycle from idea to customer value. Data-driven feature development Customer usage insights Value-driven prioritization Companies I've Helped Grow I've had the privilege of working with innovative companies to help scale their technology and teams. Protectwise Acquired by Verizon "Jake was instrumental in building our cloud-native security platform. His technical leadership helped shape our architecture and team practices." - Devops Engineer, Protectwise Food Service Warehouse "We were deploying c# on vSphere when Jake joined on our first Nodejs backend team. He had been using Docker, we identified Kubernetes as our next step, and Jake hit the ground running. Our node services had the fastest release cycle in the company." - Architect, Food Service Warehouse Cloaked "Jake is a force for good unlike any other. He migrated our infra to a cheaper and more scalable system, crafted a CI pipeline that accelerated deploys by 30x, and taught the whole company how to make data-driven decisions by building and showcasing an entire product analytics stack. And that was just his first 6 months." - Director Platform Engineering, Cloaked CyberGRX Now ProcessUnity "I watched Jake redo a build and deploy process over the span of 3 days, whip up a presentation, and get every engineer in the org up to speed using it to deploy new services, a moment I'll never forget because our productivity EXPLODED afterwards." - Software Engineer, CyberGRX Inception Health "I also wanted to second (third? Fourth?) Jake's skills here. I don't have anything unique to add as everyone else has already covered it, but this man will help you achieve what you need." - Senior Platform Engineer, Inception Health Magic "Jake worked in the pit with [the operations team] and everyday came in with killer energy. Everyone else told us how to work around problems. Jake built us better tools." - Magician, Magic From Zero to Production Start with the smallest valuable feature set, then evolve based on real user feedback and data. Development Philosophy Focus on core user value first Ship early, gather feedback Iterate based on usage data Scale what works Technical Foundation Production-ready infrastructure Automated testing and deployment Built-in monitoring and analytics Scalable architecture patterns Development Approach Quick Starts From idea to first user value in days Data-Driven Every feature backed by usage metrics Rapid Iteration Continuous improvement based on feedback Supercharge Feature Delivery Stop waiting weeks for features to ship. Eliminate manual tasks. Give your teams the tools and automation they need to go to production with confidence. Common Pain Points Slow, manual deployment processes Inconsistent environments causing issues Limited visibility into system health Security patches falling behind The Solution Automated pipelines for instant feedback Infrastructure as code for consistency Real-time monitoring and alerts Automated security updates Quick Feedback Automated test runs Code quality checks Security scanning Continuous Delivery One-click deployments Automated rollbacks Environment promotion Full Visibility Performance metrics Error tracking User analytics Impact on Your Team Faster Deployments Less Manual Work 24/7 System Monitoring Confidence in Delivery Build Product Minded Teams Transform your engineering teams into data driven teams that understand customer needs and deliver measurable business value. Common Challenges Features built without clear success metrics Limited understanding of customer behavior Disconnect between technical and business goals No feedback loop from production to planning The Transformation Data-driven feature development and iteration Real user behavior insights inform decisions Clear metrics tied to business outcomes Continuous learning from production data Analytics That Matter Feature usage tracking User journey mapping Performance impact Experimentation A/B testing framework Feature flags Controlled rollouts Customer Feedback In-app surveys Usage analytics Support insights Results in Teams That Focus on Customer Value Make Data-Driven Decisions Innovate Continuously Ship with Confidence Modern Cloud-Native Stack Leveraging industry-leading tools and practices for rapid, reliable delivery Platform AWS cloud infrastructure Kubernetes orchestration Cloudflare edge networking Terraform infrastructure as code Delivery GitOps workflow Continuous Integration pipelines Automated Continuous Deployment Infrastructure automation Observability Product usage analytics System Telemetry A/B testing Error tracking & Crash Reporting Are We a Good Fit? I specialize in modern web technologies and cloud infrastructure. Let's make sure we are a good match. Great Fits SaaS Applications Web applications, APIs, and cloud-native services Infrastructure as Code AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern cloud platforms Developer Experience CI/CD pipelines, development workflows, and team productivity Software Delivery Deployment automation, monitoring, and operational excellence Technical Leadership Architecture decisions, team guidance, and technology strategy Not Great Fits Design Work While I can do a little design work, you dont want me creating your user interfaces. Security Penetration Testing While I implement secure practices, I'm not a dedicated security auditor IoT & Firmware Development I don't work with embedded systems or hardware-level programming Complex Algorithms Deep computer science problems or algorithmic optimization Machine Learning While I can integrate ML services, I don't develop ML models © 2024 Jake Gaylor. All rights reserved. Toggle navigation Jake Gaylor Jake Gaylor Full Stack Engineer 720.453.3994 Download Resume Read Blog Hacker and Entrepreneur My passion for programming was sparked in 2001 doing CRUD on a LAMP. I have a ton of experience developing web applications and I have worked with a variety of platforms and technologies to build software and have deployed software to the web, Mac OS X, and Linux. My understanding of many different programming languages and frameworks has exposed me to new paradigms, which helps me pick the best tool for each job. I do any work I can openly on Github and am a big fan of open source. I love talking shop, so reach out if you want to chat. I started a company in 2013 which launched two products. Both were SaaS applications involving collecting and curating large sets of social media data and I built the technical stack from servers to CSS. I learned to do a lot of non technical things as well while starting NestedData, including writing copy, managing finances, hiring, firing, negotiating contracts, marketing, on boarding, and most of all how to talk to customers. Developer I have 7 years experience hacking professionally. I've worked on CI/CD pipelines, internal productivity tools, social media applications for social scientists, open source blogging software, an xmpp chatbot to provide a CLI to the vast League of Legends data on the web, and architected multiple distributed systems. Given a set of objectives, I can evaluate them to then build the infrastructure and applications to meet them. I'm a hacker at my core, so I thrive in an environment where I am able to help determine the technical direction, though the entrepreneur in me really wants to talk to the users in order to challenge my assumptions. Ops Automated, repeatable deploys - I use tools like Chef, Packer, and Terraform to model infrastructure as code in order to be able to test it before releasing changes to production environments. A solid configuration management codebase saved my team's bacon more than once. Having infrastructure in code means we can be back up in minutes and only one person has to be distracted by what could other be a catastrophe. CI/CD - Using Code Review, Docker, Jenkins, and a solid test suite, I built a CI/CD pipeline for the SocialDrizzle web app and it's supporting services. Our team was able to make changes to the application and see them in production as soon as they passed muster, without having to waste time doing repetitive, error prone tasks. Recent Past Lately I have been doing a good deal work with Kubernetes. It is an unopinionated PaaS on top of which tooling can be built to provide a great amount of business value with less technical investment than ever before. I have also been working with CoreOS and concourse-ci to enable rapid creation of CI/CD pipelines that scale. Before that I spent a lot of time working with Meteor and I recently built a social media data collection system in node that allows me to use (Twitter/Facebook/Instagram) bots in multiple applications while only having to do the work of writing the logic and building/deploying infrastructure once. My latest, public, launch was a chat bot for League of Legends. It was built in a week and documented at https://github.com/jhgaylor/StatBot/wiki/Day-0:-The-Beginning. Please feel free to check out the repository as an example of my work. Future I'm looking for work as an operations engineer. My ideal role would be one where I can provide tools and services to developers to reduce the friction of creating and maintaining production ready software. An average day might include meeting with a dev team to discover pain points (cross team collaboration), working on a client library to interface with the experimental metrics2.0 backend (coding/helping devs interface with ops), reviewing a merge request to the terraform/cloud formation repository, and possibly tracking down the root cause of a production outage. I’d like to be in a position where I can have a say in how we choose to do things but also put my head down and knock out the actual implementation. On the side I'm toying with building a Heroku-like service on top of GKE at Cloudflinger.com. It's open for use but it's may disappear at any time as it is a side project consuming actual cloud resources. The placeholder marketing site is being hosted using the service. Projects Statbot [Link] Highlights XMPP client using Hubot to communicate. Express.js HTTP API Server Redis for cacheing. Led to the creation of a new npm package, Big Cheese. Deployment was automated using Tutum.co Ramped up from 1 to 7 regions in hours. Contributed a patch upstream to LeagueJS. 14k+ Redditors visited the project on day one. The entire project, from launch to finish, took just 7 days. About A chat bot for League of Legends. LoL players, especially those not in the top tier of competitive play, often need more information about the game... quickly! It is quite common for players to "alt-tab" to sites like lolking, lolnexus, lolcounter, probuilds, or many others. Once on the site gamers have to type, click, and wait on load times, all while under extreme time pressure. To make matters worse, they often need information from one (or multiple!) source(s) during champion select, another source at the load screen, and yet another during the game. All of these things add to the players' stress level, and some times, they don't get done in time. Thus these constraints have in game ramifications. Statbot makes it easy to get all the information you need instantly in game. Node.js Coffeescript HTTP Redis XMPP Express.js Tracer Highlights Meteor.js Web Application Twitter Bootstrap CSS Framework Python Social Media Data Collector Consumed real time and historic data. Celery & RabbitMQ for a scalable Asynchronous Task Queue MongoDB for Application State and Social Media Data Storage Integrated with FullContact and PiPl web apis. About Tracer offers a quick and easy way to identify, capture, codify, and report a person's social media data. With just a person's email address or username, Tracer helps you identify the target's social media accounts and provides you with both historical and real-time data. Meteor.js Node.js Coffeescript Python Celery RabbitMQ MongoDB Vagrant SocialDrizzle [Link] Highlights Entire System of services and networking deployed with the most up to date code using Ansible, Docker, Jenkins, and Github. Built using micro services including: a data collector, a data router, a data consumer, a data labeler, a web application, and a marketing site. Employs a fleet of bots that consume data from social networks. Web Application built with ♥ using Meteor. Launched first version at Mississippi State University after just 12 weeks. About A startup venture for providing social engagement to the patrons of public events. SocialDrizzle offers game day production crews a turnkey solution for highlighting fans' social media messages and pics on stadium video board. SocialDrizzle provides the whole package -- a collection and curation application, custom designed templates, hardware connection to your existing production equipment, on-site set up, and unlimited tech support. Get in touch if you want to know more, I'd love to talk to you about my experiences launching a product and starting a business. Meteor.js Node.js Coffeescript MongoDB Ansible Docker Redis Websockets Microservices Unit Testing SASS GNIP Jenkins CI/CD Django-blogger [Link] Highlights Exemplifies Django Best Practicies Easily Themable with a python package using Twitter Bootstrap. Feature Filled multi tenant blog. i18n & l10n Includes an HTTP Api Support posts written in markdown. About A reusable Django app for blogging intended for one or more contributors. The purpose of this project is to create a basic, but feature complete, blogging platform for Django v1.4. The project was intended to exemplify best practices in Django at the time of writing. The package has been downloaded nearly 50,000 times since creation. Python Django Unit Testing i18n l10n RSS REST Api TLDR.io api wrapper [Link] Highlights Python Package for accessing TLDR.io's HTTP Api Simple API that maps closely to the API documentation. One of my early projects with tests. Thoroughly documented. About I was really enjoyed using [tldr.io's service and I wanted to find a way to give back. When I discovered they had an HTTP Api and no Python library, I jumped at the chance to build it. Python Requests HTTP Api Unit Testing Bonus.ly Api Wrapper [Link] Highlights Node.js Package for accessing Bonus.ly's HTTP Api. Intuitive API that attempts to feel like the http api using javascriptisms. Usable as a static class - convenient if you already have an api key in memory. Instantiate the class to have a client that will track the api key for the mostly recently authenticated user. About Node bindings for the bonus.ly http api using the request package. The idea was to treat the HTTP api as a set of calls that could be described using a few common parameters. I was trying to get as close as I could to "generating" code. (I should learn a lisp!) Adding new endpoints becomes as simple as writing a POJO. This wouldn't work if the HTTP API didn't have internal consistency. By describing the required parameters, we can give feedback to the developer without waiting for a round trip. This comes at the expense of having to update the client library any time the http api changes. Depending on how "frozen" the api is, this may or may not be a good trade off. I built this to easily allow that feature to be removed. Node.js Request Promises HTTP Social Media Tracking and Analysis System (SMTAS) [Link] Highlights Django Web Application jQuery for client side pizazz. Twitter Boostrap PostgreSQL Python Social Media Data Collector Consumed real time data. Celery & Redis for a scalable Asynchronous Task Queue Google Maps About A system to collect, analyze, and visualize social media data for researchers to gain valuable insights into public opinion, views and fluidity. SMTAS is focused on the social network, Twitter, where researchers have access to approximately 500 million tweets per day. Tweets are public postings made by worldwide users of Twitter. Apart from the real-time access to Twitter, SMTAS also has access to historical data/tweets posted via Twitter since 2006. Apart from Twitter data being a rich information source of human behavior (170 million active users) in a social network, it also provides researchers instantaneous information from its user base with its faster (compared to other social networks) message propagation. Python Django Celery Redis Unit Testing REST Api PostgreSQL jQuery Twitter Bootstrap Google Maps ECMAScript 5 GNIP Streaming HTTP SMTAS from Innovative Data Lab on Vimeo. Employee Management System Highlights Meteor Web Application deployed as a standard node application using Demeteorizer Touch Screen Friendly Internal Productivity tool used by an 80 employee survey call center. Required matching existing timecard printouts closely. About "Timemaster" was desperately needed by Mississippi State University's (MSU) Social Science Research Center's (SSRC) Survey Research Laboratory (SRL) in order to wrangle the timesheets of 80+ intermittent workers. The tool saved a team of 4 supervisors a significant amount of time that was being spent on paperwork. nginx Node.js Coffeescript MongoDB Meteor.js Unit Testing Chef Codeship Read How Google Works The Everything Store The Goal: A process of ongoing improvement The Phoenix Project The Five Dysfunctions of a Team The Lean Startup Hackers and Painters Two Scoops of Django Javascript: The Good Parts JavaScript Allongé Discover Meteor XMPP: The definitive guide Founders at Work Node.js the Right Way Rework The Virgin Way Zero to One Delivering Happiness It's Not Luck Critical Chain The Five Temptations of a CEO Customer Development for Entrepreneurs Think Like a Freak Start with Why Great by Choice Growth Hacker Marketing SuperFreakonomics Made to Stick Leaders Eat Last The Spirit of Kaizen Rolling Rocks Downhill Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Start with Why The Founder's Dilemmas Reading Effective Devops Get in Touch

Tools

get_resume_text: Returns the candidate's resume content as text

get_resume_url: Returns the URL to the candidate's resume

https://jakegaylor.com/resume/

get_linkedin_url: Returns the candidate's LinkedIn profile URL

https://linkedin.com/in/jhgaylor

get_github_url: Returns the candidate's GitHub profile URL

https://github.com/jhgaylor

get_website_url: Returns the candidate's personal website URL

https://jakegaylor.com

get_website_text: Returns the content from the candidate's personal website