Mario Russo brings 12 years of experience building digital products and platforms. He focuses on technical architecture and development but has also worked in product leadership, user experience, and project management. Mario has assisted both large and small organizations optimizing technical strategies and bringing platforms to market. He believes in agile development methodologies, open-source software, and is passionate about creating highly functional applications that are also easy to use.

Building out digital platform for scientific research data.

Supported customer-facing web applications for a health and wellness client.

Enterprise-class web application design, development, and support.

Artisan's Asylum is a non-profit community craft studio and manufacturing facility.

The Ironworks is a fabrication and design studio specializing in sculpture and blacksmithing.

Focused on increasing the adoption of alternate fuels and transportation methods in the Atlanta area.

Roundarch was founded by Deloitte Consulting specializing in user-centric web development.

CamliClipper is a Chrome browser extension I developed for clipping web images and saving them along with additional metadata to your Camlistore server.

Rover is a hardware project I started which aims to put perspectives previously available only to professionals into the hands of every action camera user. Rover enables you to capture emotive and immersive footage to better share your life's adventures.

The SSBLA hosts sled racing events. We developed an electronic race timing system complete with drag-race inspired start lights that monitors racer time and speed at the finish. Current projects include cloud data persistence and RFID racer identification. Our initial version was written up on the MAKE blog!

Senior Concentration: Design with microcontrollers and embedded systems.

Three month sabbatical to formally explore design in an intensive studio environment.

API v2 is designed and developed following a documentation-first methodology to support both the internal and external consumption and creation of research data.

To assist with the launch of a new SaaS product I conducted an audit of the existing site in order to evaluate the existing experience. Following a review of industry best-practices and competing technologies I created a cheat-sheet for implementing user on-boarding and enhancing user engagement.

As part of a performance tuning effort for an existing customer portal, I was engaged to review the production log data and codebase to take steps to improve page-load time. To ease in the harvesting of application data I created a Python log parsing script to extract and aggregate active data queries and running times. Slow running queries were then optimized where required, but the majority of the work was identifying the common queries and eliminating duplicates per page by implementing a caching layer.

In response to an increasing user base and planned expansion of personalized user communications, my client realized it would no longer be able to adequately support the user notification service in-house. I migrated the application from a custom JavaMail and SMS implementation to use cloud-based providers for Email and SMS, MailChimp's Mandrill and Twilio.

The goal of this project was to migrate a large wellness assessment survey onto a better performing and more scalable platform. The major risk factor was the faultless migration of complicated business and scoring logic. I designed and developed a comprehensive regression test suite to validate logic branching decisions, score calculations, and the resulting dynamic content which would be displayed to the end-user. I worked in conjunction with the development team to identify potential errors as the functionality was developed, so that when we received an initial test dataset of ~12,000 survey responses for validation, we were able to match all but 6 test cases, which were later found to be erroneous.

The United States Air Force portal is a platform for strengthening community and sharing information with remotely stationed personnel. Our team created an incremental plan to migrate the application away from the BroadVision One to One Enterprise platform to a custom portal based upon open-source frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. Our initial effort moved the application from the BV Interaction Managers to IBM WebSphere Application Servers which alleviated request queueing issues and drastically improved page load times. We then began a substantial content and data migration effort from the BroadVision schema of 100+ tables to ~15 on the new schema. Additionally, we redesigned the portal UI to break the visual ties from the BroadVision paradigm of 'Pages / Portlets / Blocks'. We also built an entire content publishing and management system to serve the unique organizational structure and processes within the Air Force. Over the course of the project we were able to decommision five physical servers, eliminate $1M in annual licensing costs, and see application performance gains on the order of 350+%.